Текст книги "The Perfect Stranger"

Автор книги: Wendy Corsi Staub

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

You just never know.

It’s been over a year now since Beck married Keith. They’ll probably be starting a family, too, soon.

Meredith has so much to live for. If only . . .

Shaking her head, she turns off the light and leaves the kitchen, never noticing the cut screen on the window facing the newly planted garden out back, or the shadow of a human figure lurking in the far corner.

Tragic News

This is Meredith’s daughter, Rebecca, writing. I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I’m still in shock. But you all meant a lot to my mom, and she would want our family to let you all know that she passed away this weekend.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks

Chapter 2

The news reaches Landry Wells on the sort of picture-perfect summer morning when it feels as though nothing can possibly go wrong.

It’s warm—southern Alabama in June is always warm—but not yet too steamy for sipping hot coffee on the second-story porch swing. A gentle breeze stirs Spanish moss draped in the live oaks framing her view of Mobile Bay, and the world is hushed but for chirping birds and the staccato spritzing of the lawn sprinklers below.

Still unshowered, wearing the shorts and T-shirt she threw on to walk the dog after rolling out of bed, Landry sits with her bare feet propped on the rail, laptop open to the Web page that bears the shocking news.

News that struck out of nowhere on what promised to be another precious, precious ordinary day.

Years ago—after a routine mammogram gave way to the sonogram that led to the biopsy that resulted in a cancer diagnosis—she couldn’t imagine ever living another ordinary day. But the women to whom she turned for support—an online group of breast cancer patients and survivors she now counts among her closest friends—assured her that normality would return, sooner or later. They were right.

Every night, when she climbs into bed, she thanks God for the gift of a day in which she carted her teenagers around and did loads of laundry and sat sipping coffee with her husband; a day filled with reading and writing, weeding the garden, feeding a family, watching good television and decadently bad television, grumbling about crumbs and clutter and mosquito bites but never really minding any of it.

She watches a monarch butterfly alight on a pink rose blossom in her sunlit flower bed below and thinks of Meredith.

She had been doing so well. Yes, Meredith had reported a recurrence well over a year ago. Her oncologist found some suspicious cells in her breast, and after a radical mastectomy and radiation, pronounced her clear again.

That’s what she wrote, anyway, in one of her typically cheerful blog entries.

Was it a lie? Was she shielding them all from the grim fact that her cancer had spread; that she was dying? Was she trying to avoid the familiar shift in interaction they had all witnessed on other cancer blogs?

Landry considers the inevitable scenario that commences whenever a fellow blogger reports, in a post laced with incredulity, bravado, false cheer—or all of the above—that her doctors have run out of treatment options.

There’s always a prompt outpouring of support, prayers, hollow optimism, and talk of miracles. Eventually—too often overnight—the blogger’s posts will begin to detail alarming symptoms, hospital visits, hospice arrangements. Attempts at breezy humor fall flat; entries become increasingly graphic and sporadic, infused with sadness, weariness, fear.

Then come the final posts written by someone else—a daughter, a husband, a friend—sometimes chronicling the blogger’s final days or hours, often reporting that the patient wants her Internet friends to know she’s thinking of them; that their comments are being shared with her in her lucid moments. Once in a while the blogger’s own last entry—sometimes intended as a farewell, but often not—is followed by just one other: a loved one’s terse report of the death and funeral arrangements.

With Meredith, there’s been none of that. Her daughter’s post had struck out of the blue.

Bewildered, Landry scrolls up to the previous blog entry. Bearing Saturday’s date, it was written by Meredith herself.

Having read it when it first appeared, Landry is already familiar with the buoyant account of Meredith’s weekend morning spent planting a vegetable garden in her Ohio backyard.

Her husband was still away, she wrote, so she had to dig and lug heavy bags of fertilizer herself. But it would all be worthwhile, she said in closing, a few months from now when she got to enjoy my favorite treat in the whole wild world: home-grown tomatoes, heavy with sugar and juice, eaten straight off the vine, sprinkled with salt and still warm from the sun.

The woman who wrote those words seemed to be looking ahead to August without reservation. Was she deluding herself, or trying to fool everyone else, writing about arduous physical labor when she was in fact confined to a hospital bed in the final stages of her disease?

This is crazy. It can’t be real.

Maybe it’s some kind of practical joke, or . . .

Maybe Meredith’s blogger account was hacked, or . . .

Maybe it’s real and she just didn’t want us to know.

Feeling vaguely betrayed, Landry opens a search window, types in the name Meredith, and stops to think for a moment.

She knows her friend’s last name is Haywood—or is it Heywood? Heyworth? Something like that. And she lives in a Cincinnati suburb . . . but which one?

Funny how you can know someone intimately without having that basic information; without ever having come face-to-face in the real world.

She types Haywood into the Google box and presses Enter.

There are a number of hits for Meredith Haywood– none that fit.

But when she replaces Haywood with Heywood, she finds herself looking at a death notice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, accompanied by a familiar photo: the head shot Meredith uses on her blog.

It’s real.

A lump rises in Landry’s throat, but she pushes it back and reads on, dry-eyed.

There was a time when she cried over Hallmark Christmas commercials. She wrote about that on her blog last December. Turned out that a surprising number of her followers did the same sappy thing.

These days it takes a hell of a lot more than a sentimental advertisement to bring tears to her eyes. She got used to holding them back in the wake of her diagnosis, not wanting to frighten her children, or depress her husband, or feel sorry for herself. Perhaps, most of all, she was afraid that if she allowed herself to start crying, she’d never stop.

But this is no Hallmark ad. It’s a death notice—albeit a brief one, not a full-blown obituary. Details are sparse, funeral arrangements incomplete.

Shaken, Landry closes the laptop and stands. Resting her elbows on the wooden railing, chin cupped heavily in her hands, she gazes out over the water.

Just beyond the boardwalk, in the shallows close to shore, a pair of kayakers glide in parallel symmetry. Farther out: the usual array of fishing boats, plus a cluster of sailors taking advantage of the morning breeze. Not a cloud in the sky; the forecast calls for a beautiful day.

Again, Landry is struck by disbelief.

I need to talk to someone. I should call someone.

But not her husband.

Rob left for the office less than ten minutes ago, kissing her good-bye as she poured her coffee and reminding her that it’s Wednesday, golf day, and he’ll be home late. Right now he’s driving, somewhere on the road between here and his law office in Mobile.

Anyway, he doesn’t know Meredith—though he knows about her, of course, along with the other bloggers Landry counts among her closest confidantes. Bound by a common diagnosis, they found their way into each other’s virtual worlds by chance and settled in with the camaraderie of old pals. She shares things with her online friends that she would never dream of telling anyone she knows in real life, other than Rob.

Oh, who is she kidding? There are some things Landry can’t even bring herself to tell Rob, yet somehow she’s comfortable putting it all out there on the Internet—hiding behind a screen name, of course.

Some bloggers just go by their first names, but her own is much too distinctive to ensure anonymity. She devoted nearly as much time to choosing a screen name as she had to baby names when she was pregnant with her children, ultimately deciding to go by BamaBelle.

“BamaBelle?” Rob echoed when she first shared it with him. “Bama as in Alabama?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know . . . Obama?”

“No. Baaaaama. Not Bahhhma.”

She wanted him to congratulate her on her cleverness, not critique it—but he was Rob. He wasn’t just nitpicking—he was protecting her, being cautious.

“I don’t think you should share anything specific online about where you are, Landry.”

“That’s not specific. This is a huge state, and it’s not like anyone’s going to figure out exactly where I am. Or care.”

“How about just ‘Southern Belle’?”

“Too cliché. Rob, it’s BamaBelle. Too late to change it. It’s already out there.”

He scowled, unaccustomed—back then, anyway—to her being short with him.

These days, thanks to the residual pressures of her illness, along with his job stress, and raising temperamental teenagers, they’re much more prone to snapping at each other, or bickering—usually about little things.

For the most part, though, they get along. He’s Landry’s best friend and soul mate. He loves her and has her best interests at heart.

But he’s not the person she needs for comfort right now, when she’s reeling from the news of Meredith’s death.

No. I need . . .

She gazes at the monarch butterfly below, still perched on the rose petals. It flutters its wings as if contemplating liftoff.

I need to talk to someone else who knew Meredith. Someone who will share my grief; someone who might know what happened.

Unfortunately, she can’t just pick up the phone and call one of her blogger friends. Nor can she even text. She doesn’t have their phone numbers. The only way to get in touch with them is online.

Returning to her laptop, she opens an instant message window, then sits with her fingers resting over the keyboard, once again staring into space, wondering whose screen name she should type.

Ordinarily she’d reach out first to Meredith, the unofficial matriarch of the group, but . . .

Something flutters in the air just beyond the balcony rail. The monarch butterfly. She watches it flit away, backlit by the sun against a brilliant blue morning sky.

Landry swallows hard, shaking her head, and types the first name to come to mind.

Awakened by the tone indicating that an instant message just popped up on her laptop across the hotel room, Jaycee opens her eyes to darkness.

Certain it’s the middle of the night, she glances at the digital clock on the bedside table and sees that it’s a little after 5:00 A.M.—an hour that may not technically be the middle of the night, but doesn’t necessarily qualify as morning when you crawled into bed at three after a long flight, a late dinner, and too much champagne in a suite down the road at Chateau Marmont. It was almost like the good old days for a little while there, before her life derailed. She could almost forget . . .

Almost. But not entirely. She’ll never forget. They won’t let her.

Whoever is trying to reach her—probably Cory, oblivious to the time difference—will just have to wait until a decent hour.

With a groan, Jaycee rolls onto her other side—and gasps, seeing the silhouette of a woman across the room.

Dear God, she’s back!

Terror sweeps through her even as common sense attempts to remind her that it’s impossible. She can’t come back, because—

With a burst of clarity, Jaycee realizes it’s just the silhouette of her long blond wig sitting atop the tall bureau across the room, draped over its wig form.

Of course it is.

And of course she can’t come back, because she’s dead, because . . .

Because I killed her.

With a shudder, Jaycee pulls the pillow over her head, desperate to escape into a deep, blessed sleep, where the nightmare—the one that continues to haunt her waking hours—can’t reach her.

Standing in front of her classroom filled with first graders, Elena writes the name of today’s dinosaur on the board, sounding out the syllables as she goes.

“Steg . . .”

“Steg,” her students echo.

“O . . .”

“O.”

“Saur . . .”

“Saur,” they say—well, eighteen of them do.

The nineteenth, Michael Patterson, shouts, “Ms. Ferreira! Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just dinged!”

“Thank you, Michael. Come on, people. Saur . . .”

“Saur . . .”

“We already said that one!” Michael protests.

Elena clenches the whiteboard marker in her hand. “You didn’t say it. Join us, Michael. Saur . . .”

“Saur . . .”

“Us.”

“Us.”

“Stegosaurus! That is our dinosaur of the day, boys and girls. Can anyone tell me—”

“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer! It’s dinging again!”

God, give me strength, she prays silently, to deal with this kid for another . . .

She glances at the big black and white wall clock. It’s only a quarter after eight. The school day has barely begun.

Okay, God. I need strength for another six hours and forty-five minutes.

Wait a minute—today isn’t an ordinary day. There’s a staff meeting after school, followed by Activities night, when her first graders return with their parents to tour the classroom display of their culminating projects and present a musical skit. She won’t be free to make the half-hour drive home until well after nine o’clock.

And after that she’ll still have to get through seven more days before summer vacation begins.

Well—two more full ones after this. Beginning on Monday, they have a week of half days before the school year trudges to an end at last.

It’s not that her current students are such a bad bunch of kids. For the most part they’ve been spirited, avid learners. Over her decade of teaching in this small Massachusetts town, Elena has only had one—maybe two—groups where the challenging kids outnumbered the pleasures. But the long Memorial Day weekend—a cruel teaser of a break, she has often thought—always marks the beginning of the end. Everyone is fidgety and no one feels like being in school for almost another month. Especially when the gray chill of New England spring gives way to warm, sunny days that create restlessness in the kids and a greenhouse effect in the un-air-conditioned classroom.

Elena’s computer, on the carrel by the window, sounds another alert. Darn. Someone is trying to instant-message her. That’s not unusual—just distracting. She usually keeps the volume muted while she’s teaching, but she turned it on this morning before the students arrived and forgot to turn it off again. Her friend had sent her one of those funny YouTube videos in an e-mail—one that was totally inappropriate to watch in an elementary school classroom, with or without the kids present—but it’s June. Everyone at Northmeadow Elementary School is slacking off. Even the teachers.

“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just—”

“Thank you, Michael. Right now we are not worrying about my computer. We are worrying about the stegosaurus. Or are we? Does anyone know whether the stegosaurus would want to eat us if we ran into one? Would we have to worry about that? Raise your hand if you know.”

“We can’t run into one,” Michael blurts as several others raise their hands, “because humans and dinosaurs can’t be alive at the same time! Dinosaurs have been dead for sixty-five million years!”

The kid is smart as a whip. If he weren’t so darned disruptive, she’d be more willing to appreciate his intelligence.

With a sigh, she agrees that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist. “But if they did,” she adds patiently, “humans would have nothing to fear from stegosauruses because they’re herbivores. Raise your hands, please . . . who knows what an herbivore is?”

Naturally, Michael does. After defining herbivore—without raising his hand—he asks if she’s going to check her computer.

“Not right now,” Elena tells him, the patient smile straining her cheek muscles.

Just six hours and forty-four minutes . . .

And then just seven more days . . .

The moment Kay Collier sees the message pop up on her computer screen, she knows what it must be about.

Meredith.

She’s been sitting here thinking about Meredith in her small home office off the kitchen ever since she got back from her rainy morning walk a little while ago. That’s when she got online and spotted the blog entry written by Meredith’s daughter.

A china teacup filled with jasmine tea has long since grown cold beside her keyboard as she struggled with how—and whether—to post a comment in response. No words of comfort she’s conjured so far seem even remotely appropriate for such an overwhelming tragedy.

But BamaBelle’s brief query demands nothing more than a simple, Yes, I’m here.

After Kay types the three words and hits Send, there’s a long pause, as if Bama is trying to figure out how to word the tragic message she needs to deliver.

Sparing her the ordeal, Kay writes, Terrible news. You saw?

This time, the answer is instantaneous. Yes. So upset.

Me too. What the hell happened?

Then, realizing she might have just offended BamaBelle, one of the more ladylike members of the blogger network, she adds, Sorry. Pardon my French. I just—

Bama’s response pops up before she can finish. I didn’t know she was sick again. Did you?

No clue. Guess she didn’t want anyone to know.

Feel so helpless.

Me too. Have you talked to anyone else?

No. You?

No.

Kay stares glumly into space, trying to think of something else to say.

Grandmotherly Meredith was everybody’s friend, the heart and soul of their online group. She was always there when you needed her, the first to pop up with a comforting word or a virtual hug—indicated by multiple parentheses around a person’s name.

((((((((((((Kay))))))))))))) was the last thing Meredith ever wrote to her, in final response to a heartfelt private message exchange just last week.

She sounded normal in the post she wrote Saturday about gardening, she writes now to BamaBelle. Did you read that?

Yes. That’s why I’m so freaked out.

Me too.

Kay pauses. Waits.

BamaBelle, too, seems to have run out of things to say.

Kay types, GTG.

Shorthand for got to go.

NP is the response; shorthand for no problem.

That’s the nice thing about these online friendships. You pop in and out of each other’s lives with much less ado than in real life. There’s no obligation to provide detailed explanations about why you’re coming and going.

IM me if you find out anything, Bama writes. Or call if you want to talk. I’ll give you my number.

Kay responds to Bama’s offering with her own cell number, but she’s not sure how she feels about that, because . . . because . . .

Because the walls are coming down.

Until now she’s felt so safe with these Internet friendships. When you’re shy and accustomed to maintaining your privacy, there’s a certain comfort to keeping people at arm’s length—in real life, anyway.

Now that her mother is gone and her old schoolmates and neighbors have moved away or moved on, caught up in lives of their own, there are no real life friends. There are no longer even colleagues: she was laid off from her job as a guard at the federal prison in Terre Haute a few years ago, thanks to budget cuts.

Kay spends most of her time alone, unless you count people she’s never even met in person.

Her online friends are her family. The only people in the world she cares about; the only ones who care about her.

A final message pops onto her screen from Bama: I wish we all lived in the same town so that we could help each other through this.

Me too, Kay replies automatically, though she doesn’t really wish that . . . does she?

The bloggers have had an ongoing discussion about getting together in person sometime. Recently, someone suggested organizing a meeting to coincide with breast cancer awareness month in October, or joining forces for one of the Making Strides walks around the country, or for a march in Washington, D.C.

Kay isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that it’s never managed to get beyond the wishful thinking stage.

In real life relationships, there’s always pressure.

If her online friends met her in person, they might expect her to be something she isn’t. Or they might turn out to be something she doesn’t want them to be.

Then I’d lose everything.

That can’t happen. It’s too special—sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. She loves these people and she needs them, now more than ever . . .

She pushes back her chair, stands, and gets halfway across the room before pausing to straighten a framed photo that doesn’t really need straightening.

It’s an old black and white portrait showing her parents on their wedding day, circa 1962. They were together two decades before Kay was born, then separated before her first birthday.

Her mother never forgave her for that; or for being born—which was, after all, the reason he left.

Mother never came right out and said her conception had been an accident, or that they hadn’t wanted children, or that it was Kay’s fault the love of her life had walked out, leaving her a struggling single mother.

She didn’t have to say it.

It was obvious from the way her mother looked at her, the way she treated her, the way she cried over old photos of him . . .

Especially this one.

In it, her parents are standing on the steps of a church that used to sit a few miles from this house where Kay has lived all her life, in the western suburbs of Indianapolis. She remembers when the church was torn down, about ten years ago, maybe fifteen, to make way for a now-defunct shopping plaza. Yes, at least fifteen years ago, because Mother was still alive, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the Indianapolis News was still the evening paper, and business was still booming in this neighborhood.

Mother tore out the short article with its side-by-side black and white photos—before and after, from brick church to pile of rubble—and showed it to Kay.

“This is where Daddy and I were married,” she said, as if Kay didn’t know; as if that man had actually been a “daddy” to her.

As old age and illness got the best of her, Mother was increasingly delusional.

“I always thought I’d have my funeral there,” she said wistfully. “Now where will it be?”

“Please don’t talk about that, Mother.”

“I have to talk about it. It’s not that far off, you know.”

Yes. Kay knew.

She stares at the picture of her parents on their wedding day over fifty years ago, looking into each other’s eyes with blatant adoration. Her mother, in dark lipstick and a puffy veil, and her father, in a dark suit with a skinny tie, are obviously madly in love.

The photo sat upstairs, framed on her mother’s bedside table, until the day she died.

All her life, Kay had hated looking at it. Yet when the time came, she couldn’t bear to throw it away.

Maybe it was better to hang onto it, she decided, as a reminder never to get too close to any man. You’d only end up alone and brokenhearted.

“The old saying is wrong. It’s not better to have loved and lost,” her mother used to rasp in her cigarette voice. “Believe me. If you don’t love, you can’t lose.”

Kay took those words to heart. In her formative years, she had casual friendships, even a date here and there . . . but managed to avoid the risks that come with real relationships. Now, when she wants companionship, she finds it online, and when she needs a creative outlet, she posts entries on her blog.

That’s how she met Meredith and BamaBelle and the others—how many years has it been now?

She used to be able to keep track of things like that. But a lot of details about the past have become fuzzy lately.

Too bad she can’t choose which memories to keep and which to let go. There are a few that persist in haunting her waking hours and dreams, and she’d give anything to banish them forever.

You left me! Why did you leave me?

I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!

Kay turns away from the photo and leaves the room.

Even with the windows closed, there’s a depressing chill in the air this morning, just as there was on the gloomy spring morning her mother died. Now, as then, the house is filled with rainy day shadows.

Kay forces herself to turn on lights to brighten the rooms as she goes downstairs. Meredith, a true believer in the physical healing benefits of an optimistic attitude, frequently wrote about surrounding yourself with positive energy.

In the dining room, Kay stops and turns on the old tabletop radio, tuned to the upbeat oldies station. Meredith wouldn’t want her to wallow in the gloom.

After flooding the kitchen with overhead light, she dumps her cold tea into the sink and turns on the flame to heat water for a fresh cup.

Waiting for it to boil, she reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill and shakes out the pill she takes daily to keep cancer at bay.

Meredith, whose cancer, like Kay’s, was hormone fed, was on the same chemical regimen. They used to compare notes. She never dreamed the drug had stopped working for her friend until Meredith shared the news with her privately not long ago. Her cancer was back, Meredith told her, and spreading. Her days were numbered.

Kay was stunned. She knew her upbeat friend had her share of problems. Meredith had written blog entries about her husband’s job loss, about never having enough money, that sort of thing. She always made light of her troubles. But this, she’d kept to herself.

Please don’t tell the others, Meredith wrote to her. I’m going to reach out to them one by one, here and there . . . but I’m not comfortable sharing with everyone just yet.

I won’t say anything. I promise.

Kay kept her word. She didn’t tell, and she won’t tell, not even now that Meredith is gone. Not even if it means lying, the way she did just now when she was messaging with BamaBelle.

She turns on the faucet and lets the water run, a lifelong habit.

“You never know what’s lying around in these old pipes,” Mother used to say when she was a little girl. “Don’t take a drink from the tap until you’ve washed it all away.”

“Washed all what away?”

“You know. The toxins.”

Kay wrote a blog about that once. About Mother, perpetually veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, wasting time worrying about negligible issues, devoting not nearly enough energy tending to the things that were actually within her control.

That post generated more comments than most; her online friends related to the irony.

Kay grabs a tall glass from the cupboard above the sink. She fills it, turns off the tap, and swallows the pill, along with a couple of ibuprofen.

She has a headache again. It happens a lot lately. In her levelheaded moments she assumes it’s probably just middle-aged eye strain, spending too much time on the computer. Maybe she needs a stronger prescription for her reading glasses.

But other times, paranoia and pessimism get the best of her and she’s sure it’s the cancer—that it’s back, spreading tumors into her brain.

After all, the preventative medication didn’t prevent cancer’s death march through Meredith’s body. It didn’t work for Mother, either, during her own brief remission, or for Whoa Nellie or countless other bloggers who had lost their battles.

Why should it be any different for her?

But if the cancer ever does return, it’s not going to ravage her until she draws her last anguished breath. No, she’ll put an end to it before that can ever happen. She has the means, tucked away upstairs in her nightstand drawer. It could all be over in a flash.

Please, please, let it have been that way for Meredith . . .

With a trembling hand, Kay sets the glass into the sink and goes back to glumly waiting for the teakettle to whistle.