The felons ball, p.10
The Felons' Ball, page 10
It was perfect, Natalie thought. She had no idea if this was Jay’s take on a verse from the Yoga Sutras, or if he’d cribbed it from a self-help book, or if he’d made it all up on the spot, and it didn’t matter. The important part was that he spoke with total conviction and sincerity, as if, despite his denials, he really did have some uncommon access to spiritual wisdom. This was why Hashtag Yoga had cracked ten thousand listeners per episode, and why Jay and Cassie had half a million followers when other yoga influencers had trouble breaking a hundred thousand. Her arms felt tingly, and she realized she’d broken out in goose bumps. Cradling Anjali with the other arm, Cassie had discreetly raised her phone to chest level while her husband was talking, and Natalie realized that she’d filmed the whole thing.
15.
Kaitlyn and Luke were staying over. After they cleaned up, Luke put on a movie, but Natalie didn’t bother following the plot, which had something to do with four college buddies taking a road trip to Vegas with a pet monkey. She picked at her cuticles and thought about Ben being cremated, his poor torn body fed into the yawning flames. No one would ever acknowledge that she had a right to be there. She was the closest thing he’d had to a girlfriend at the time he died, but no one would ever know it, and it was her own damn fault for insisting they keep the relationship a secret. If she’d put everything out in the open, maybe Ben would have trusted her with his own secrets. Maybe, she thought, he might even still be alive.
She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she felt her mother standing over her. “Jay left his wallet,” her mother said, waving it in her hand. “I was going to ask Luke to take it over to the guest house, but I don’t want to wake him. Your father’s already in bed. Do you think I should call Jay to come get it, or just wait for the morning?”
Natalie looked at Luke stretched out on the other side of the sectional, mouth open, snoring lightly. “I’ll do it,” she said.
Her mother shook her head. “Absolutely not. You’re not going out in the dark alone.”
Natalie sighed. “Mom, why did you wake me up if you didn’t want me to take it to him? You can watch me from the kitchen window.”
Her mother glanced at Luke and Kaitlyn’s sleeping forms, and Natalie was surprised when she said, “All right.” Perhaps she’d weighed the unpleasantness of an argument with her youngest daughter against the negligible risk of Natalie being attacked by a kitchen-knife-wielding madman and concluded that it was better to let her have her way. “Flick the porch lights on and off so I’ll know you’ve made it.”
Natalie expected the outside light to come on when she stepped off the porch, but nothing happened. She stood there for a moment in the dark, scuffling the dead leaves at her feet. It wasn’t like she really needed the light, she told herself; she’d walked this path a thousand times, maybe more. The guest cabin had started its life as a playhouse for her and her sisters, which Trey Macready had added on to over the years until he’d concluded that he might as well make it a permanent structure. The walk was less than a quarter mile across the backyard and through a short stretch of woods, and Natalie could see the cabin’s porch light through the waving limbs of the bare oaks.
She shivered and zipped her coat up to her chin. Be here now, she told herself and took off across the yard at a fast clip, wanting to break into a run but fearing the branches that could have blown down in yesterday’s winds. The air smelled of dead leaves and woodsmoke, and through her fear, she felt a rush of adrenaline that was almost a kind of pleasure.
Cassie answered the door and put a finger to her lips. “We just put the baby down,” she said, taking the wallet from her hand. “Are you coming in?”
“For a minute,” Natalie said, looking past her to Jay, who was on his mat in the middle of the living room, stretching into a downward dog. The soft burr of a white noise machine came from the loft, where Anjali slept in the five-hundred-dollar Scandinavian crib their mother had ordered for Cassie’s infrequent visits. Natalie flicked the lights by the front door and turned back to wave at Rosemary, watching from the kitchen window.
“Sorry,” Jay said, smiling at her between his arms. “I haven’t been able to do my usual practice for the past couple of days. I can’t do anything in here without bumping into a wall.”
Natalie watched as he kicked up into a forearm stand, his body straight and strong as the trunk of a tree. If she thought about it too hard, she began to wonder if there was something wrong with admiring her brother-in-law’s alignment when he was wearing those Manduka shorts, which were basically a Speedo with a couple inches of thigh coverage, but how could she help it? “You know, I go into the studio before class,” she said as he flipped his arm position to turn the forearm stand into a tripod headstand. “I usually leave around five thirty, and no one else comes in until after seven. You could come with me if you want.”
Jay thumped down to sit on his heels. “Really?” he said, looking at his wife. “Cassie will be your biggest fan. I know I’m driving her crazy falling out of scorpion pose ten times when Anjali is trying to sleep.”
“Oh my God, yes,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes. “Please, get him out of here.”
Her tone was light, but Natalie couldn’t help doing a double take. The response had been too quick, and something about Cassie’s tone made it sound as if she really meant it. But as far as Natalie had been able to tell from social media, Cassie and Jay were happy together—certainly happier than Kaitlyn and Luke, who sometimes argued about money and Kaitlyn spending time at the studio when Luke thought she should be at home. Natalie wished she and Cassie were close enough for her to ask her sister what was going on, but she knew that Cassie wouldn’t have welcomed that conversation. She’d made it clear by now that she didn’t want to open up to Natalie or vice versa. “Happy to help,” Natalie said.
The studio was her favorite place in the world. She loved the feeling of the bamboo floor against her feet and the slight smell of sweat that never quite went away, even after they’d burned about a hundred candles. She loved the arty black-and-white photos of her and her sisters lining the wall behind the desk: Kaitlyn in a simple balance pose with the sole of one foot pressed against the opposite leg, Natalie in an extended side plank, and Cassie in a backbend that made her look like a contortionist. Even on the worst of days, Natalie felt her pulse rate lower the second she walked through the door.
Some mornings, when it was still dark when they arrived, she forgot about Jay altogether. Sometimes, after she’d started her practice, she disappeared into the routine, the way she would have in an empty room: the slow joy of her body opening up, her muscles loosening. She lost track of time and thought of nothing but the sound of her own breath, her heartbeat like the roar inside a seashell.
But as soon as the sun came up, angling straight in the eastern-facing windows, everything changed. Now she could see him, and he was doing poses she’d never even attempted, the kinds of poses that people were thinking of when they said that yoga meant tying your body into a pretzel. Jay could flip from a handstand into a backbend and back again. He could put one foot behind his neck and rise to a standing position, hands at his heart. Sometimes Natalie sat back on her heels and simply watched, the way she might at Cirque de Soleil.
“Could you give me a hand with dropbacks?” he asked one morning, catching his breath after a series of arm balances she’d never even seen on the internet. “I don’t need you to help me up, but if you could just stand there, it would be a big help. I’m feeling a little creaky in my lower back today.”
She was pretty sure she knew what to do. Though she’d never attempted one, she knew that a dropback is when you stand at the front of your mat and bend back, bringing your hands down to the mat before standing up again. The teacher was always stationed in front of the student, sometimes holding their waist, but often simply standing there for moral support. Natalie readied herself, lunging forward on her right leg and tensing her arms, just in case Jay had overestimated himself and needed her help after all.
Since they’d begun practicing together, she’d been careful not to look at Jay in a way that might denote sexual interest, but now she had no choice. He dropped easily back to the mat and popped up again, as if a coiled spring in his spine had tensed and released. Her eyes fell to his bare chest, the sweat shining on his collarbone, his pecs and abdomen, and then to his crotch. It wasn’t her fault, she told herself. What was she supposed to do, close her eyes?
“What is the sequence you’re doing?” she asked when he finally stopped and lowered himself to a seated forward bend.
“I’ve been working on the third series of ashtanga,” he said, his voice muffled as his face pressed into his shins. “It’s taking me a while to get through it, and it only gets worse from here. Fourth series is super gnarly.”
Gnarly, she repeated to herself. He had that California way of talking that she’d only heard on TV before they met. What, she wanted to ask, could be more gnarly than standing up with your foot behind your head? What was next, levitation? “You know, you could add in some advanced poses too,” he said, making a gesture that took in her whole body. “You have the strength and flexibility. You could do more, go deeper. I could teach you.”
“Oh.” She dabbed at her face with a towel, hoping she could blame it on the heat. “I don’t know if I can drop back and grab my ankles today. Maybe we can work up to it.”
He smiled in a way that made her breath catch in her throat. “We can go as slow as you want,” he said.
16.
She thought maybe she should feel guilty, but it wasn’t like they were doing anything wrong. Like everyone else, she’d heard the stories about the yoga gurus who harassed or even assaulted their students, and she’d listened to the episodes of the podcast where Jay and Cassie discussed how teachers could respect students’ personal boundaries by creating a safe space and always asking before making a hands-on adjustment, but to Natalie, these so-called ethical guidelines had always sounded like bullshit, rules made for a theoretical world rather than this real one. Jay never touched what her mother used to call her “bathing suit area,” but often she could feel his hand moving just outside or above, the sweep of it sparking a slow electricity beneath her skin.
She found him attractive, that was undeniable, but she wasn’t sure she really liked him all that much. Jay usually had a private online class right after their joint practice, and after the fourth or fifth time Natalie heard him start asking the student to ground herself in the breath and repeat “Be here now,” she started closing the office door as soon as she heard the ping of the Zoom notification. He always sounded sincere, but maybe, she thought now, that wasn’t the same as actually being sincere. Maybe, as her father had once told her, the greatest con men were the ones who didn’t even know they were running a con.
Still, she didn’t really consider quitting until they got to deep backbends. In the studio lit only by the flicker of the electric candles, Jay directed her through a sequence: this many sun salutations, then poses to elongate and strengthen. He stood over her, one foot braced on either side of her body, and used his hands to encourage her rib cage to spread and open as she lowered her head to the floor and reached for her feet. She felt as if something was cracking in her chest. She was slick all over, every inch of her, and then she was suddenly lightheaded, weak as water. She turned on her side and she was crying, racking sobs that poured out of her as she listened in a kind of horror. She wondered if this was how Amanda had felt spewing blood over the laminate, amazed by all the ugliness that turned out to be inside her.
“Hey,” Jay said. “This is totally normal.” He sat cross-legged beside her and handed her a towel that she used to dab at her eyes, thanking him in a whisper. “Believe it or not, I see this a lot. There’s emotional stuff in there that you’re stirring up.”
The tears continued, even when she told herself sternly to stop crying. “I thought I was just being a baby about it,” she said. “That’s what Cassie said, when I told her how much I hated backbends.”
Jay put a hand on her knee. “You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that there’s a connection between physical and emotional trauma. Everybody has it, but as a yogi, you’re actually working your way through it, which means that you’re miles ahead of most people.”
Natalie nodded, tossing the towel toward the laundry basket in the corner. She had no idea what Cassie had told Jay about the boat crash, but surely he knew that Natalie had been injured and spent time in the hospital. She wondered if he would ask her about it, and if he did, how much she wanted to tell him.
“Take me, for example,” he said before she could speak, drawing his knees to his chest and lacing his arms loosely around them. “I don’t know if Cassie’s told you, but I was into some bad stuff when I was a teenager. My dad was really strict, and I wanted to be as unlike him as possible. I would try anything once, but then somebody took me surfing, and it changed my whole life. Suddenly I was on my board just about every minute that I wasn’t eating or sleeping. I was never going to be the best, but I had some sponsorships, and I got invited to some of the big tournaments. Then one weekend I went up to northern California with some buddies and I wiped out. The board broke, and my leash got tangled in the rocks. Finally I got my ankle strap off and came up, but that was the longest ten seconds of my life.”
When he paused, Natalie recognized the look on his face. It was what she’d felt when he’d put her in that backbend—something resurfacing in the body that you never even knew was there. “Anyway,” he said, rubbing a hand across his face, “I came out of it with a broken arm and a broken ankle, but it could have been much worse. I probably could have gone back to surfing after six months or so, but I just couldn’t bring myself to get back on the board. Instead I just sat in my apartment, and for a while my insomnia got so bad I was actually hallucinating. Then a friend suggested I try a yoga class.”
Natalie waited, but he was smiling now, as if the message of the story was self-evident. She felt a vague sense of disappointment. “And that’s it?” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “You went to a yoga class and you were cured?”
“It wasn’t that easy,” he said. “But things got better. Trust me, it’ll be the same for you.”
But that was the problem: she didn’t trust him, and she couldn’t shake a feeling of dissatisfaction. If Jay really understood her—had seen into her, as he sometimes seemed to—he would be able to admit that yoga wasn’t going to magically solve all her problems. It wasn’t going to change the fact that she’d found Ben Marsh’s body, or that she’d no idea what she was doing with her life. Being here now wasn’t going to help with any of that.
“I’m not a guru,” Jay said from time to time, but in that self-deprecating way that seemed to imply that he really was a guru, simply a modest one. A man like that could be all things to all people, she thought, and maybe never even realize that he was lying the whole time.
17.
By the time Luke came by, Jay was in the shower and Natalie was dust-mopping the studio. “Easy,” Luke said from the doorway. “What did that floor ever do to you?”
Natalie flushed and dropped the mop, which clattered to the floor. “Sorry,” Luke said, holding up a paper bag marked with the logo of Ewald Coffee. “I just got off the overnight shift, and I stopped by to bring y’all breakfast.”
“Kaitlyn hasn’t come in yet,” Natalie said as she peeked into the bag, which held two scones, one blueberry and the other cranberry-orange. “But as long as you’re here, could you take a look at the sink in the women’s locker room? It’s been leaking for weeks.”
Luke rolled his eyes but said he might as well. “You want to show me which one?”
She led him through the door and pointed to the folded towel under the U-bend. Luke got on his knees and peered at the pipe. “This is probably loose,” he said, shaking it a little. “Y’all still got that toolbox in the office?”
Natalie went to get it. Kaitlyn was always teasing her about calling Luke or their father to take care of jobs that she could have handled perfectly well on her own, but fixing the sink seemed like the least Luke could do after he’d given Kaitlyn such a hard time about taking the job as studio manager. Though they never seemed to have enough money, Luke disliked the idea of Kaitlyn working outside the home, and had made her promise to give up teaching yoga after the baby was born.
The problem with Luke, she thought, was that he had her father’s overbearing personality without her father’s sense of humor. Instead of looking at life as a comedy, he thought of it as an action movie where he would at some point be required to prove his toughness on a grand scale. In restaurants he sat with his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him. In crowds, he found the nearest exit and sized up the people who stood between him and the door. It had always seemed a little over-the-top to her, but it was probably one of the qualities that made him a good investigator. “Hey, did you ever figure out anything about that knife?” Natalie asked as she slid the toolbox across the floor.
“Nothing to figure out,” Luke said. “It’s just a regular old kitchen knife, no blood, no fingerprints. Hardy’s thinking about calling in the state police so we can get some kind of expert testing, but with the capabilities we have, there’s no way to know if it’s even the knife that killed Ben. Can you hand me that clamp?”
Natalie held it out on her open hand. This was a possibility she hadn’t considered. What if the stain on the knife wasn’t blood after all? Then the damning proximity to her family became nothing more than an unlucky coincidence.
