Only Ever You (9 page)

Jill stopped short in the hallway, confronted by boxes of various sizes and colors, all of them holding baby supplies—a stroller, a bouncy chair, blankets, a baby bathtub, and dozens of tiny outfits. “We’re giving back the things we got at the shower,” Cathy Dilby explained in a lifeless voice. “Some people said we should hold on to them, but I can’t have them in the house—not now.”

There were footsteps on the stairs, and Tom Dilby stepped into the hall hauling another box—the crib. “That’s the last of it,” he said to his wife before he noticed Jill.

“She’s brought the photos,” Cathy said. Tom came immediately to his wife’s side and shook Jill’s hand. His face was also strained, dark circles under red-rimmed eyes, but he seemed to be holding it together for his wife’s sake.

“Thanks for coming—let’s take a look.” He gently eased the album from Cathy’s limp hand and ushered her over to the sofa in their cramped living room. Jill followed, perching across from them on an armchair while Tom set the album on the coffee table and slowly turned the pages. Cathy teared up immediately, but she smiled, too, touching her son’s image. No one would ever guess that the child was dead.

When Jill first learned about bereavement photography, and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, the charity that provides free photography sessions for families of stillborn or terminally ill newborns, she’d felt compelled to volunteer. Some people thought it was morbid, but she knew how precious it was to have photos to remember your child no matter how brief his or her life. She had her own precious album tucked away at home that she still looked at. David didn’t want photo reminders, so couldn’t understand why this was a kind service for grieving families. It was also something Jill was uniquely qualified to do, but he was right—it was so hard to take these photos, so hard not to think constantly of Ethan.

“They’re beautiful,” Tom Dilby said, voice gruff. He glanced at Jill, then away, swiping roughly at his eyes with the back of a hand.

“He looks so peaceful, doesn’t he?” Cathy Dilby sounded slightly more animated.

“Yes, definitely.”

Jill sat with them for another few minutes while they talked about their son, waiting for a lull before excusing herself.

Tom Dilby walked her to the door. “I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but Cathy wanted to do it. Now I’m glad. Once all this is gone”—he swept a hand out to indicate the pile of baby supplies—“what else will we have left to show that he really existed?” His voice broke on the last word and she felt a lump in her own throat. He coughed, embarrassed, stepping past her to open the front door. He shook her hand with both of his. “If we can ever return the favor, just let me know. Anything at all.”

Jill had to take a moment to compose herself once she was alone in the car. As she drove away, she looked back at the Dilbys’ small brick house with that sad little scrap of blue ribbon dangling from the lamppost. If she came back a year from now would they still be together? Sometimes she wondered if she and David would have pulled through if it hadn’t been for Sophia. Relationships, like life itself, could be so fragile.

A glance at the clock pulled her out of her musing. She raced toward the preschool, keeping one eye out for cops and another on the dashboard clock. Fox Chapel’s roads were twisting and narrow, with almost no shoulder, and some sections heavily wooded. A shower of leaves blew across the asphalt, a rainbow of red and orange.

She pulled into the preschool lot just as another parent was leaving. Sophia stood in the doorway, a forlorn figure clutching the teacher’s hand. Jill ran up the steps. “So sorry I’m late.”

“No problem. We had a good day, didn’t we, Sophia?” The teacher’s smile seemed forced and she glanced at her watch. “We’re working on listening, aren’t we, Sophia?”

Jill’s heart squeezed at the tired look on her child’s face. She and David had talked to Sophia after Mrs. Belmar’s warning and things had been improving, but at what cost? Maybe the director was right and Sophia was just too young to be there. She took Jill’s hand, clutching Blinky and several crayon drawings, all of them of dogs. She showed them to Jill as she was buckled into the car seat. Dog in a park, someone walking a dog, a dog chasing what looked like a ball but what Sophia informed her was a “fizbee.”

“These are great,” Jill said. “I love the blue color you used for this dog.”

“That’s just peetend,” Sophia said. “Dogs is not blue.”

“You’re right, dogs are not blue. What color are dogs?”

Sophia perked up a little, chattering happily about her current favorite subject as Jill slipped behind the wheel. As she raced out of the almost empty parking lot, headlights flashed on and another car pulled out behind her. Jill turned out of the lot and the other car followed. It was dark and the wind had picked up. Leaves flew around the car as Jill raced down the hill. Pause at the stop sign, turn signal clicking. Traffic suddenly opened up and she shot left, surprised when the other car followed her. Jill drove as fast as she could, foot flashing between accelerator and brakes, taking turns so tightly that the tires squealed, but her eyes kept straying to the rearview mirror. The car remained close behind her the whole way home, making every turn that she did.

Oblivious, Sophia chattered on about school, talking about the “mean teacher,” but Jill couldn’t focus, her attention on the other car. When she turned onto Wakefield Drive, Jill slowed down, waiting to see if the other car would turn in, too, but it zipped past.

So it hadn’t been following them. Jill laughed a little.

“What’s funny?” Sophia asked from the backseat.

“Mommy’s imagination,” Jill said.

She couldn’t quite shake the unease and she waited until the garage door was fully closed before getting out of the car. She hustled Sophia into the house and up the stairs. “You better pick out some toys and games; Nana’s going to want to play with you.”

With Sophia occupied, Jill quickly changed, throwing on a formfitting blue dress that David especially liked. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, imagining his reaction.

The doorbell chimed and Jill grabbed her pumps, carrying them as she raced down the stairs to let her mother-in-law inside. The front door was unlocked. Taken aback, Jill paused, wondering how that had happened. She and David came in and out of the house through the garage; the front door should have been locked.

The doorbell chimed again, then a third time. Elaine Lassiter was trying to peer through the sheer-curtained windows that flanked the door. Jill yanked it open.

“Where were you?” Her mother-in-law stepped inside hauling two bags loaded down with what looked like a refrigerator’s worth of food. “I thought something happened to you or, God forbid, Sophia.”

Jill ignored the insult, leaning in to air-kiss the older woman’s cheek. “You didn’t have to bring dinner.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble.” Elaine led the way to the kitchen, making herself right at home like she always did, plopping her bags on the island and unpacking. “I knew you didn’t have time to cook, not with getting back so late from your busy job, and I didn’t want poor Sophia to suffer—”

“Speaking of Sophia, I better go say good-bye.” Jill ran back up the stairs and down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom. Sophia stood balanced precariously on the sill of the window that looked out onto the backyard, her hands and face pressed against the glass.

“Get down from there!” Jill grabbed her around the waist and lifted her away.

“Lemme go!” Sophia protested, squirming in her mother’s arms. “Me watching a doggie!”

Jill set her down, but held on to her, crouching so they were face-to-face. “That’s dangerous, Sophie. You could fall through the glass.”

Sophia plucked at her mother’s grip with tiny fingers, shrieking, “Let go!”

“Is everything okay up there?” Elaine’s voice came from the direction of the stairs. Jill released Sophia to stop the noise.

“Everything’s fine,” she called. Sophia gave her mother a baleful look and scrambled back on top of a toy bin that she’d overturned near the window. So that was how she’d gotten up there. Jill’s concern overrode a brief feeling of pride in her daughter’s ingenuity.

“No,” she said, lifting Sophia off the plastic bin, righting it and moving it away from the window. “You do not climb onto the window ledge; it’s not safe.”

“I want the doggie,” Sophia cried. “Let me see the doggie.”

“What doggie?” Jill asked. She picked Sophia up and held her at the window. Had another neighborhood dog gotten loose? The sun was setting and Jill peered through the gloom, but there was no dog in sight. “Where was the doggie, Sophie?”

“In the trees.” Sophia pointed a chubby index finger toward the woods at the back of the property. “The doggie lives in the trees.”

It had to be her imagination; Jill firmly believed that. Or tried to. She felt the same unease she had earlier. When they went downstairs, she made sure to check the locks on all the doors.

chapter ten

JOURNAL—JUNE 2009

You cornered me one evening in the parking garage.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you,”
you said. Corny, right? Classic romance-movie stuff, but name me a woman who doesn’t like to be admired or told she’s beautiful. It helped that I was tired and disheveled after hours of searching case law, and feeling pretty low at the thought of going home alone to my cookie-cutter townhouse.

Of course, you are not responsible for my vulnerability. That is entirely on me. But you are responsible for stalking and seducing a colleague. In court you’d call my words inflammatory, but I think they’re accurate.

You offered to buy me dinner and that seemed innocent. You offered to drive us to the restaurant in your car because parking was tight. You knew that after dinner, after we’d shared a bottle of wine, after we’d talked about law and life and you’d pulled personal details from me and flattered me by listening intently to everything I had to say, after all that you were intending to fuck me in your car.

I have thought a lot about that night since and I must say it was artfully done. You pretended that you’d made a wrong turn down that isolated side street and it seemed perfectly natural when you pulled over under a bridge overpass to consult a map, claiming your GPS was broken. Leaning over me to fetch a map from the glove compartment, you banged the door hard against my knee and insisted you had to
“kiss it better.”
You pressed your lips lightly against my knee and then you pushed my skirt up and kissed above it and then you kept going. I tried to push my skirt down, but you held my hands out of the way. And then you fixed me with those eyes of yours and pushed the skirt right up until you’d exposed my stockings and lace underwear. I remember the sense of shock, of shaking, of wanting and not wanting.

After that it’s all a bit of a blur. I’d had a lot of wine, it was late, you were smiling as you eased my stockings down, easily holding my hands out of the way, saying,
“Ssh, it’s okay, you’re okay,”
when I protested. There was nothing rough, not that first time. You kissed my thighs and when I flinched you kissed my face and you kept saying things like,
“Does that feel good?”
like it was all being done for me instead of to me. It occurs to me now that I should have guessed by how swiftly and easily you managed it that this wasn’t the first time you’d had sex with someone in your car.

Here’s where your mastery really comes into play: I met you again. This is what I’m most ashamed of. Fool me once, etc.… Why did I, a top student in law school, a high achieving woman, allow you to get anywhere near me again? How did I let you mind-fuck me into believing that this was a love relationship?

chapter eleven

OCTOBER 2013—ONE WEEK

Adams Kendrick was a large and growing law practice, a corporate merger between two competitive firms and about to add offices internationally. Someone at the firm had chosen an overpriced new restaurant called Sprout, or Seed, or Spore, or some such name that in its very simplicity managed to be pretentious. Anointed one of Pittsburgh’s best new eateries, it was haute cuisine meets farm kitsch with pitchforks as door handles and miniature trowels as serving spoons. The food was elegantly presented, yet absurd: Pork-belly pâté shaped like a pig on a bed of radish shavings, preemie lamb chops encased in quivering slices of mint jelly. It was also, oddly, a series of increasingly smaller courses. Jill tried to make the single, albeit jumbo, scallop in this latest course last longer than two bites.

David would laugh about the food later, but right now he was too engaged in conversation to notice. Corporate people were never really off work, and the pressure was palpable. Lawyers, on the whole, intimidated Jill with their quick wit and expensive suits. They were too gabby, too eager to impress. The women were as bad as the men, all toothy smiles and shoe-polish-shine hair. They made her uncomfortable, tongue-tied, and she ended up retreating to corners at firm events. David got annoyed by this, pressing her to make more of an effort. “You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman—I want to show you off,” he’d say, presenting her to colleagues like a hothouse flower, which only made her more nervous.

Yet hadn’t she chosen this life? Hadn’t she been attracted to David in part because he pursued a law degree? The pragmatist in her, the girl who wanted to eat well and not have to worry about the electricity being cut off, that girl had passed over the MFA candidate, and the passionate Broadway wannabe, and the bearded philosophy major for the boy who had a plan in place for a secure financial future. “How bourgeois,” Tania had commented years ago when Jill told her that David was in law school. So how could Jill blame him when he turned out to be competitive and driven and, well, relentlessly lawyerly? She had made her choice and now she had to live with the side effects.

She took a healthy sip of wine. The only thing she did appreciate about these events was their commitment to booze. No alcohol-free celebrations for Adams Kendrick, and tonight’s dinner was no exception. They’d had the cocktail hour where she’d enjoyed her first glass of wine and now, finally, they’d moved on to dinner. At least this evening’s event was smaller than many others; it appeared to be a trial run for David and a few other associates. She knew some of these people, recognized others. An older partner, a silver-haired man whose name she’d immediately forgotten, smiled across the table at her. “And what do you do, Mrs. Lassiter?”