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I felt my cheeks burn and my eyes prickle, and when I heard voices coming toward the kitchen, I left quickly before anyone caught me eavesdropping. For those few weeks leading up to that barbecue, I’d felt like I was emerging from a chrysalid. I was no longer unwanted and unloved. I’d started to swap my generic baggy clothes I’d pick up from Walmart for next to nothing for more feminine dresses. I started wearing makeup. I wasn’t beautiful, but I felt pretty. I belonged, I had a family, I had a purpose: Charlie. Everything I did was for Charlie. I learned to cook, I baked, I stopped ad hoc teaching and turned to curating so I could make more money plus benefits. I had shed my old skin and emerged into the light, and I was happy. Desperately happy. Happier than I’d ever been.
Coming back from the party, I felt like someone had pulled the cloak away and that night I saw myself in the mirror for what I really was. Dull, plain, nice enough. The babysitter. Not Bronwyn. But all it made me do was try harder because I was not going to lose that family. I improved my wardrobe by another notch, with linen suits and elegant dresses. I started coloring my hair to make it shinier. I taught Charlie how to ride a bike, how to tie her shoes, how to read the time. I encouraged her love for nature and took her on long walks in the parks so we could look for birds, learn their names, identify insects, collect leaves and paste them into a book. I watched that child transform before my very eyes and whenever we saw Mike, I thought to myself, damn right I’mnot Bronwyn. Someone has to benot Bronwynif that child is going to have half a chance at a decent childhood.
When I peer into Charlie’s bedroom now, I’m surprised to find her moon-shaped nightlight on. She hasn’t turned it on for months. I pad in softly, lean over her bed to take a closer look. She’s fast asleep, the covers up to her chin. A strand of hair has fallen over her eye and I gently move it away. My eyes swim, as they so often do at the sight of that perfect child, with her perfect face and her perfect brain and her perfect tastes and her perfect everything. On the way back out, I note how tidy her room is—very un-Charlie like. But I overheard Bronwyn tell her she was messy the other day. And also, that she was slow.Stop dawdling!And it made me sick to hear her criticize her child like that. Stop dawdling? How about, stop screwing other men! Stop moving to the other side of the world and leaving your child behind! Stop being such a shit mother! But I didn’t say anything. Obviously.
I walk back out silently, then pad my way to my own bedroom and slip into bed next to Jack.
I love you.I whisper it softly, my breath on his cheek.Do you love me? Like you loved her?I think about the day Jack told me. “She left me, she’s gone,” he’d said, sobbing, and it was only later that I wondered about his choice of words. That he hadn’t said,she left us,butshe left me.
Now, as I lie there next to Jack, I feel the way I did at that barbecue.Not Bronwyn. In the wrong bed.My mind harks back to the way they used to be, the two of them. The perfect couple. Alpha meets alpha. A bit cool, a bit distant, but it suited them. It made them look like they had a secret connection they didn’t need to share with anyone. They were the grown-ups in the room. Confident, larger than life. The perfect family.
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I huddle under the blankets with my phone and scroll through her feed again. This time I get back further and find a post that I’d missed earlier; God knows how, considering it’s a doozy. It’s a selfie of the two of them, Bronwyn and Jack, in our kitchen—their kitchen?—with the wall I had retiled painstakingly with white and blue French-style tiles as background. Jack has his arm around Bronwyn’s shoulder, and she’s the one holding the phone.#homesweethome, #homebeautiful
Home beautiful all right. I painted those tiles myself and laid them too. And now Bronwyn stands in front of them, her head tilted toward Jack, so close their temples almost touch. Thank you for the backdrop.
What does Leon think of all this? I wonder. I scroll back quickly through her posts from before she came back, the last ones when she was still in Italy and I find plenty of them together, mostly sitting in their amazing gardens sipping on drinks in tall glasses, Bronwyn looking happy as ever. Then one of Bronwyn alone on a terrace, a wide brimmed hat on her head, looking out to sea. A caption:Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth. #selflove
I knew it. I just knew it. Her relationship with Leon is over. I read the caption again and I’m thinking, actually, she’s wrong about that one. It does. It’s called working for minimum wage, which I bet she used to pay everyone that toiled for her and not a cent more. Jesus. How about,#shutthefuckup. Before those idiotic platitudes, there were seemingly thousand of snaps of Bronwyn: solo Bronwyn; Bronwyn on a beach; Bronwyn in a garden; Bronwyn baking something—no, Bronwynpretendingto bake something. Bronwyn has never baked anything in her life. Bronwyn doesn’tdoanything.
I put the phone on my side table and turn to Jack, propping myself on one elbow. His eyeballs are running behind his fluttering eyelids. I wonder what he’s dreaming about. I lean in to kiss him softly on the lips. He smells of soap, a whiff of toothpaste.
And something else. It takes no time at all for me to place it.
Perfume. Bronwyn’s perfume.
FIFTEEN
It all went wrong this morning, even before I got to work. I woke up angry, tiny facial muscles flexed between my eyebrows. I read somewhere that it takes eleven muscles to frown and twelve to smile. I must have been using all eleven, for sure, and I must have done it all night because it hurt. I could hear the shower running in the ensuite and I immediately turned to Jack’s empty side of the bed and tried to catch it again, the cloying smell of her perfume. I’d woken up in the middle of the night with the horrible thought that they’d slept together in our bed while I was at work, and then I remembered that technically it washerbed, and I didn’t sleep much after that. Plus my head felt like a construction site and I was trying to remember if I’d said too much last night but I couldn’t. And I berated myself for doing something so stupid: get drunk, come home late, sleep badly.
I guess we all woke up angry because after I made breakfast for Charlie, I told her I’d take her to school this morning, and while she was upstairs getting ready, I was rehearsing what I’d say to her. That I knew she’d missed a few days of school lately, that Daddy had told me, that she wasn’t in trouble but that it wasn’t okay to lie to me, no matter who was asking. But after twenty minutes, she still hadn’t come downstairs and I went to get her, and I don’t know why I was surprised to find Bronwyn had beat me to it. She was crouched next to Charlie—who had changed into yellow and black striped tights, a yellow skirt and a red sweater so that she looked half bumble bee, half lobster—and was fastening the buckle on her shoe: a shiny black pump with a square heel, small, but definitely a heel, and a strap around the ankle.
I said something about Charlie being able to tie her own shoes, and Bronwyn sighed loudly, like I was being irritating. She tapped Charlie’s foot. “There. Shall we go, Charlotte?” She said it like I wasn’t even in the room, and to be fair, that’s how she’d been treating me the whole time, so I don’t know why I was surprised.
“Bronwyn, you’ve done the school run every day since you’ve been here. Let me take her for a change. Then she and I can have a chat.”
“Laura,” she said, in a tone that wouldn’t have been out of place during the ice age, “I’ve taken Charlotte to school every day, that’s correct. That’s because I rarely get to see my daughter, you understand? So, I’m making the most of it. Is that all right with you? I assume it is since you’re always the first to point out I am a bad mother who doesn’t even like her own child.”
“No!” I hissed under my breath. I prayed I’d spoken low enough that I could reach Bronwyn without Charlie hearing me. But it’s clear she did. She was looking from Bronwyn to me with a frown on her face and her mouth wobbling downwards dangerously.
“Mommy likes me,” she said.
“Mommy loves you to bits,” I said, taking her face in my hands because Bronwyn hadn’t and was still focused on me. “It’s just an expression, baby.”
Bronwyn bristled visibly at thebaby,but she still didn’t speak to reassure Charlie, immersed as she was in her own outrage. “No…what, Laura?”
“Don’t. Please don’t.” Then I extended my hand to Charlie and said, “You’re ready, sweetie?”
Bronwyn turned to Charlie. “Charlotte, would you prefer that Laura take you to school? Just like she does every day? Or would you like Mommy to take you?”
“Please don’t do that,” I whispered.
“Charlotte?”
There’s a real art to such passive aggressive behavior, and I have to say, Bronwyn is a virtuoso of the technique. Charlie looked at me with pleading eyes. I nodded and blinked my acquiescence.
“Mommy?” Charlie said, still looking at me.
“Of course. I’ll see you later, sweetie.” I wasn’t sure if she’d done it to keep the peace, or if she really wantedMommyto take her to school, so I decided she’d understood my hint, and that really she wantedmeto take her to school but it was all too hard, all fraught with danger with grown-ups saying things she didn’t understand and I took her head in my hands again and kissed her cheek. “I love you. Have fun at school,” I said. Bronwyn rolled her eyes, and I knew I sounded forced, fake, the fake mom with the cliched instructions.
