All i want, p.21
All I Want, page 21
That’s not part of the plan. Not what Lindsay wants to hear.
That’s when Lindsay makes up her mind to protect her interests, Ben’s interests, possibly the baby’s interests. She needs to keep Sally from screwing up worse.
It’s not the most original plan, but that’s all right. Lindsay can live with that. Her idea is inspired by something she saw on TV, on Better Call Saul.
Sally has a condition for which she’s taking a blood thinner to ward off a heart attack or a stroke or whatever. She loves talking about her health problems. She drones on and on.
Lindsay asks what meds Sally’s taking. Sally’s glad to tell her. She’s thrilled that Lindsay cares. Lindsay looks up Sally’s medication online and finds an over-the-counter pill that looks exactly like it.
One day when Sally goes to the bathroom, Lindsay finds her pills in her purse and switches them with OTC nondrowsy cold pills. She waits for the pills to work, maybe not to kill Sally, but at least make her sick—and get her out of the way.
* * *
DESTINY WANTS THIS to happen.
Lindsay goes to Ben’s rehearsal studio to perform, for his coproducers, the song from Peter Pan that she sang for Ben in their hotel room. It was better when she did it naked, but fine, this time she wears a little green slip of a dress. Not naked, but not exactly… concealing.
She and the woman, the producing partner, recognize each other.
Rebecca is Rachel.
She lied to Lindsay the whole time they were having an affair. She didn’t even tell Lindsay her real name. But Lindsay’s in no position to criticize anyone for lying.
For now it’s just more evidence that this was meant to be.
What are the chances of meeting an ex-lover in circumstances like this? What are the odds of this kind of coincidence? When destiny is on your side, the odds are close to a hundred percent.
Lindsay is willing to swear that Rachel/Rebecca’s husband, Avery, doesn’t know about her extramarital affair. It’s a little weird that Lindsay’s been involved with a man and a woman who work together, one past, one present, two lovers both cheating on their separate spouses.
None of it means anything. It’s temporary. A phase. You have youth and a body, so you use it, and then you do something else.
Rachel/Rebecca doesn’t want her husband knowing about Lindsay, and Lindsay could probably prove whatever she said. She’s seen Rachel/Rebecca naked.
At the audition, Lindsay sings the Peter Pan song the way she sang it for Ben, sad, slow, loaded with pain and regret.
Ben is ready to talk his partners into casting her, into taking a chance, a big gamble, riding the PR wave of the complete unknown. But they don’t need persuasion.
Rebecca/Rachel isn’t the brightest bulb, but she’s smart enough to figure out what Lindsay will tell her husband if she says no.
Anyway, it’s not really a problem. Because Rebecca/Rachel knows that Lindsay can do it. She’ll be great in the part. She’s young, she’s sexy, she’s appealing. Unknown. She’s publicity magic.
Lindsay looks from Ben to Rebecca/Rachel to her husband. Lindsay’s already forgotten his name. Everything is as clear as could be. Lindsay has been transformed from failed-actress-country-Realtor to future Broadway star. The Broadway star she was always meant to be.
Thank you, Hideaway Home.
Chapter Sixteen PERFUME
ONE EVENING LINDSAY and Ben run into JD at the gas station when they’re driving up from the city together. JD could blow the whistle on them, but he chooses not to. Maybe he’s protecting Emma. Maybe he’s protecting his job. It doesn’t matter so long as he keeps quiet.
Except for crashing that dinner, he’s been good so far. It occurs to Lindsay that maybe he likes Emma and would rather keep a big secret from her than possibly bring down everything so he couldn’t be around her.
Lindsay’s delighted when Ben tells her that Emma suspects him of having an affair with Rebecca. Hilarious! Lindsay was the one who had the affair with Rebecca.
“Here’s an idea,” says Lindsay. “Get me some of that disgusting perfume Rebecca wears, and I’ll wear it when I stay over at your apartment. In case Emma comes to town, she can think she’s right about who you’re fucking. I don’t particularly like the smell, but it’ll throw her off our trail.”
Every time Lindsay sees Ben, she hints that something is a little… off with Emma. Is he sure his wife is feeling okay? She doesn’t seem right in the head. She isn’t totally stable. Will she really be the perfect mother for a helpless baby?
They watched Gaslight together. Ben plays dumb, but they both know what they’re doing.
Of course his crazy paranoid wife can’t handle the responsibility. She’s seeing things, hearing things, imagining things. What if she decides that the baby is the spawn of Satan?
* * *
EVERYONE LOVES THE Christmas pageant. It’s a huge success.
Lindsay finds it touching. She likes Ben’s music. A little churchy but nice.
She adores the crazy spikes of emotion in Emma’s face when she introduces her to Heather, and Emma sees the girl in the field, the girl in the old photo, and she figures out—or does she?—that she’s just a local unwed mom. DNA explains it. Up here in the boondocks, everyone looks like everyone else, back through the generations.
Let Emma think she wasn’t seeing a ghost, or photos of ghosts, but a real young woman, probably the product of years of country inbreeding.
Let the snooty city bitch think whatever she wants.
It baffles Emma, which is helpful. It’s a good idea for Emma to seem confused and out of control with a lot of people watching.
The sweet Christmas pageant makes Lindsay feel better about where she lives, more cheerful about the idea that she might live in the area someday, with more money and frequent acting jobs—starring roles—in the city. The jury is still out on whether she’ll live with Beth or Ben. She goes one way and then the other on what they’ll do about the baby. Sometimes she thinks she might actually like to have it. To bring it up as her own child. Have a kid with none of the bother. No stretch marks, no labor pains, no swollen leaky tits.
Let Emma have the baby and nurse it until Lindsay and Ben can feed it formula, and then they’ll take things from there.
* * *
DURING THE INTERMISSION between the Nativity pageant and the talent show, Lindsay is scribbling down names at the back of the theater. Sally hovers around, as if she’s making up her mind, and then she asks if she can go last.
Lindsay figures why not.
But soon enough she sees: Why not. Absolutely why not.
Sally must have plotted this all along. She must have hidden the costume somewhere. The minute she comes out onstage, Lindsay senses something wrong, but it takes her a moment to untangle the twisted threads.
In between getting the journal back from JD and passing it on to Beth, Lindsay kept it in her desk at work for a few days. And now she realizes that Sally must have found it—and read it.
Sally’s dressed like Eliza Doolittle. Like the woman in the Cockney chorus, the woman in the journal. No way this is pure coincidence. Sally is screwing with Lindsay’s head.
Why is Sally bothering? She must think it’s a clever way of letting Lindsay know that she knows what she’s doing, a smart way of warning Lindsay to leave Emma alone.
Stupid woman, really.
Sally’s performance is about the worst Lindsay’s ever heard, and that’s saying something after the talent to which they were just treated. But it’s especially shaming, because Sally’s slowed-down pace feels like a parody of the way Lindsay did the Peter Pan song for Ben and his partners.
Maybe Sally’s been drinking. Maybe she brought a flask to the pageant. She seems a little unsteady. Maybe Lindsay’s switching her blood pressure medication is finally having an effect. Which would be fine. Lindsay hopes the damage happens sooner rather than later.
But Sally’s performance has its good points. It’s freaking Emma right out. She’s radiating nervousness like some buzzy, jittery aura.
Of course Sally’s read the journal. Lindsay knows it can’t be coincidence. She can’t figure out what it means. But it means something.
Who is Sally, and what is she doing?
Emma stands.
She steals the show, you could say. Upstages Sally completely. She solves Lindsay’s Sally problem by screaming and screaming and then fainting dead away.
And then, just as they manage to partly glue Emma back together, Sally does the most outrageous thing of all. She sidles up to Emma and—using the exact quote that Lindsay and Beth gave to the old lady in the journal, the one who got “murdered” at Hideaway Home—warns her to leave, to get away. She says “they” made her sing the song, when the truth is, Lindsay knew nothing about it. Sally must think she’s doing more improv.
That’s it. Sally has crossed the line. Something needs to be done. If the switched pills don’t do their magic, Lindsay will have to act.
* * *
OH, SALLY, SALLY. Lindsay feels worse than she expected. Sally deserved what she got, but still… Lindsay wishes she hadn’t had to kill her pretend stepmother.
Lindsay’s mother is dead. Her name was Grace. She was the cashier at Nibble Nook. She died of a brain aneurysm at work.
Sally took things too far. She went way off script. Warning Emma was really pushing the limit.
Maybe Lindsay wanted the feeling of having two parents, a father and a stepmother who wanted her to succeed. Who wanted her to sell a falling-down wreck, a monster white-elephant house, to a young couple—easy marks—from the city.
* * *
ONCE AGAIN DESTINY kicks in. Fate offers a helping hand.
The effect of switching Sally’s blood thinner went to work that same night. The night of the Christmas pageant.
Ben and Emma had left for the city.
Lindsay and Beth, Sally and Ted were in Ted’s living room, watching Law and Order reruns. Trying to relax.
Sally went into the kitchen to make tea.
Beth said she’s seen this episode before, but Ted made her promise not to tell them who the killer is. Lindsay knew, but it was still entertaining.
They’d reached the final scene—the victim agrees to testify—before they noticed that Sally was still in the kitchen.
Lindsay found her lying on the kitchen floor. There was no pulse. Her face was twisted in a horrifying, crooked grin, as if she was enjoying some private joke.
The private joke was death.
Beth called an ambulance.
They went back into the living room to wait. The ambulance took fifteen minutes, not bad for up here.
Two men ran in. They strapped Sally to a gurney, but their grim faces—one of the guys gave Ted an almost reflexive head shake—delivered the bad news.
Sally wasn’t a bad actress. She took it seriously. She loved it when Lindsay gave her the character’s backstory, how she’d been born in Hideaway Home, and her mom had given her away to a local couple. The story was she had no idea who her real mother was.
Lindsay should have found someone who could play a person who could keep a secret.
After Sally’s lunch with Emma, Lindsay had a bad feeling.
It wasn’t as if Sally knew everything, but she knew enough to chew a little moth hole that could start everything unspooling. And then came that warning.
That was bad improv. Really bad. Totally out of line.
Lindsay couldn’t let that happen. There was too much at stake.
The pills—or the lack of—took a while to work. It was another lucky break that it happened the night of the talent show. Maybe the stress of being onstage was too much for Sally. Maybe God was punishing her for singing that song. Lindsay tells herself that Sally died happy. On the heels of a great stage success. All the high of opening night before the reviews come in.
* * *
LINDSAY CAN’T IMAGINE what possessed Emma to come to the Peter Pan rehearsal. She can’t imagine, but she thinks, Bad idea, lady.
That Emma has never shown up until now is a tribute to Ben, who’d convinced her that it was better for both of them if she kept her distance.
All the way across the rehearsal studio, Lindsay can feel Emma’s shock and confusion.
Unless Emma is really stupid, she must have figured something out, or else she is doing it now. Probably both. Did Ben lie to her about the star of his show? Did he not tell her it’s Lindsay? Did he say it was a big surprise that he was saving for when the show got closer to opening? Maybe Emma never asked.
Emma’s obviously shocked, but glazed over, like someone who’s had so many shocks that she can’t feel them anymore.
“I need a doctor. Now,” says Emma.
Chapter Seventeen EMMA
EMMA AWAKES ON the floor in a pool of something. Something wet. She’s wet herself. Her first response is shame. Then she remembers who she is, what she is, where she is. Ben’s rehearsal space.
Her water has broken. She’s going into labor. Ben’s on the phone with her doctor.
Ben puts on his coat.
“Don’t leave me,” Emma says.
“I’m going to get the car,” he says. “Avery and Rebecca will help you down in the elevator.”
Emma has a million questions, but the contractions are coming faster than they should. They’re supposed to start slow. You’re supposed to be able to time them. A certain number of minutes apart, and it’s time to go to the hospital. She can’t remember the numbers. The intervals. These are coming quickly.
Is she—or the baby—in danger? She will do anything she has to to save the baby. She will only think good thoughts. She will stay brave and positive. She will wonder—just once—why Ben and Lindsay went to all that trouble, forging that journal, involving Sally.
Sally’s dead.
The girl in the field and the old photos—was that part of it? Was JD in on it too?
Emma asks herself these questions, just once, and then for the baby’s sake she stops.
She will deal with all that later. None of that matters now.
Ben’s got the heat in the car turned up all the way, and it feels good when Emma gets in the Volvo. He reaches across the console and takes her hand. It’s painful to think that he used to do that all the time. He did it that first day they came up to look at the house. Maybe that was the last time he held her hand so tenderly. And now he’s doing it again.
It makes everything simpler. Here they are, the two of them, the baby on its way.
A forged journal. An affair. An elaborate deception aimed at hurting her. She still wants to think it’s possible that, once the baby is born, everything will get sorted out. She and Ben will leave that complicated, twisted world and enter a new one together. She’s afraid it’s too late. But despite everything, she desperately wants to believe that something positive can still happen. She thinks, You can believe anything if you want to, badly enough.
Another contraction peaks and fades and disappears. She squeezes Ben’s hand, which is now clutching the wheel.
Against all odds, she dozes off between contractions.
* * *
THE NEXT THING she knows, it’s crowded and bright. She hears noises, voices. People are lifting her, pulling and pushing her, asking how she’s feeling. She’s fine, except that she’s being pushed and pulled. Then comes another contraction.
A wheelchair, a cold room, lots of machines, a worried nurse coming and going.
“There’s nothing we can give you at this stage,” the nurse says.
“That’s okay.” There’s nothing they have that Emma wants. She wants something they can’t give her, though she can’t remember what it is.
She wants to do everything differently. To start over. She wants to be another person. More like Lindsay. She sees that now. Too late.
* * *
DR. SNYDER APPEARS in scrubs. Her knight in shining armor. How happy she is to see his kindly familiar face! He won’t let anything bad happen to her and the baby. He consults a beeping machine that’s attached to her somehow. He presses a button and a ticker tape rolls out; it’s like checking out at a supermarket with a very large order.
He frowns.
Then more hands lift her onto a gurney, and they’re flying out of the room. Levitating, it feels like, but that can’t be true. Her view is the ceiling, lights streaming past. Then they slam through a door and the light is blindingly bright.
Someone is holding her hand. All she can see are the eyes. It’s a man. It’s Ben!
Ben’s wearing a mask and green hospital scrubs. He looks scared but also embarrassed, as if he’s been made to dress up for Halloween in a silly costume. Costume… costume… the word scares her. Pain builds and crests and ebbs like a wave that picks you up and slams you farther down the shore.
A voice says, “Emma, push. It’s almost here.”
She hears a baby crying.
Her baby.
Someone says, “It’s a girl.”
They put the baby on Emma’s stomach. Emma’s weeping. Sobbing with love and joy and relief.
* * *
SHE WAKES UP and falls asleep again, until she’s awoken again by a friendly nurse who asks if she wants to meet her baby. Emma can’t read the nurse’s tone. “Is she okay?”
The nurse says, “She’s beautiful.”
Another voice says, “She’s perfect.”
It’s Ben. He’s sitting in a chair.
For a moment she doesn’t recognize him. Then for a moment she doesn’t care. Then for a moment… what? She doesn’t know.
All she cares about is her child. The baby fits snugly into her arms. Her arms know what to do. She puts her hand under the baby’s perfect downy head, and the baby’s perfect pink lips nuzzle at Emma’s breast.
