Page 51

FIFTY

The ceiling is the first thing Alex sees when her eyes flutter open. A grid of pockmarked gypsum panels interspersed with track lighting. Her head lolls to the side. She is in a bed. A stiff white sheet covers her up to her chest. There is a clock on the wall, old-fashioned, round like the clocks in her grade school. She squints at the glowing face of it: 10:47. She can’t see a window, so she doesn’t know if it is morning or night.

“Alex,” someone says. She tries to move her head in the other direction but she’s getting tired again. She can only make out the dark shape of someone sitting in a chair before her eyelids tug down again, her eyes closing involuntarily.

She goes like this in and out of consciousness for an untold amount of time. Machines beep periodically around her. Their little red lights flash reassuringly. She thinks Janice and Raymond are there with her once, but when she opens her eyes again, they are gone and there are no chairs there at all. Once she wakes up and there is a man in the doorway, his mantis-like limbs coming toward her. Her chest seizes. The image fades, disappearing behind her lids, and when she wakes again, she isn’t sure if he was ever there.

She doesn’t know if it has been days or only hours when she finally emerges from the fog of what happened. Finally, her eyes blink open and stay that way. She is in a hospital room. A woman in a doctor’s coat comes into the room and makes her look at a bright light.

“You had a significant head trauma, but you got here just in time to stop the bleeding. You’re going to be fine soon enough.” Alex glances down to where a tube sends a steady drip of something nice into her arm. Her wrist lies exposed to the air. She catches the nurse looking at it as she switches out the IV bag. She gives Alex a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder. Alex’s eyes close again.

They open to the sound of a chair being dragged across the room. There is someone sitting next to her when she wakes again. A pair of pointy black shoes with Prada stamped on the toes flash in her peripheral vision as two long legs crisscross impatiently next to her.

Her eyes finally focus on the woman the shoes belong to. The high cheekbones, the perfect outline of her nose, the precise rose-colored lipstick.

“Regina?” Alex’s voice cracks.

“Oh, good. You’re awake,” she says, in a voice colder than you’d expect from someone who has come to offer their sympathies.

“Am I?” Alex mumbles, trying to understand why Regina is here.

“Quite the drama up at the beach house, I hear. Something about a girl from the mailroom murdering her own brother?” she says distastefully. Alex’s head throbs as she tries to remember what happened. Francis’s house. Brian. Her stomach turns. What happened to Raymond? She looks around for a sign of him. Did he visit her? She can’t remember.

“Raymond?” she croaks out. “Do you know where he is?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Regina looks momentarily flustered, annoyed by the off-script questioning.

She continues: “As you know, we can’t have our staff going around behaving badly. I spoke to Daddy, and he wasn’t so sure, but you’ll be happy that I’ve convinced him to keep you on.” She smooths her platinum-blond hair, swept into a chignon the size of a giant cinnamon roll on the top of her head. “I told him you were trying to prove that Howard killed Francis. You did us a service at the Herald . I came to thank you, actually.”

“Thank me?”

“Without all your nosing around, there is no way Howard would have gotten caught. I never would have known.”

Alex’s vision blurs as she tries to focus on what Regina is saying. Did she prove Howard’s guilt? In her half-loopy medicated state, Alex is having trouble remembering. There was a letter, something on the computer at Francis Keen’s house. Did Howard say that he loved her?

“What are you mumbling?” Regina snaps.

“Nothing.” Alex coughs.

“Anyway, I should be going. I just came to pay my respects and to let you know that you still have a job. I thought it might inspire you to get back at it more quickly. Nothing like a goal, am I right?”

Her job. Alex remembers the rush of adrenaline she felt putting the words together, unfolding the puzzle of someone’s deepest dilemmas and arranging them on the page. There are the letters of people she thought of even here from her hospital bed. Images of their lives that play out against the backs of her heavy-lidded eyes during half-waking moments. Sometimes she has even thought of something she wants to say to them, to write down, but found herself asleep again before she could try to reach for a pen.

“Thank you,” Alex says. Her throat feels dry and scratchy.

“Oh, I brought you a card,” Regina says as she stands, leaning forward to place an envelope on the flesh-colored hospital tray next to Alex’s bed.

Regina gathers herself, straightening the cream-colored sweater. So pressed and perfect. Alex wonders how she must appear to Regina. Terrible, she assumes. She can see only her own scarred wrists on the bed and the wild curls of hair in her peripheral vision. She must look like a nightmare to someone like Regina, whose entire existence is so perfectly curated it may as well be put in a gallery to admire like some sort of incredible performance art. Alex watches her lift her Chanel bag off the top of a contraption with a digitized screen. Despite being dressed down, Regina looks every bit as perfect and glamorous as in the first photo Alex saw of her and Howard at the Met Gala, in that miraculous shimmering fish scale dress. Incredible, really, for a woman whose husband just went to jail and is awaiting trial for murder.

As Regina goes to the door, Alex picks up the card and slides it open. Get well soon , written on thick cardstock in perfect tilted script. But that isn’t what makes Alex cry out. The notecard accidentally falls from her fingers, fluttering to the floor. It lands face up, a green background with a thin gold line embossed around the edge.

“I know,” Alex whispers. “I know about Howard and Francis,” she says gently to Regina’s back as her hand freezes on the door.

Regina rotates slowly on her heels, turning back toward her. Coming back to the end of the bed, she looks down at Alex and her eyes narrow. “What did you say?”

“You knew about the two of them, didn’t you? You told her you did.”

“No, I had no idea about her and Howard, only that Howard was having an affair,” Regina says in her clipped way.

Alex’s voice remains calm. “I found the note, Regina. I know. Wasn’t that what it said? I’m a little bit addled at the moment, but something like that is hard to forget. So short and to the point.” She registers a flutter of anxiety in Regina’s eyes and continues. “It would be tempting to want to punish someone your husband cheated with so brazenly and for so long.”

“I didn’t.” Her mouth opens and closes.

“It was your handwriting though. You have incredible penmanship. I’m quite envious of it, really.”

“You can’t prove anything with a note, darling,” Regina says, though her knees seem to have gone weak and she’s sunk back into the blue plastic hospital chair beside Alex’s bed. “Any woman would be angry at the woman who ruined her marriage.”

“It’s true. She did ruin it, didn’t she?” Alex says with pity in her voice.

“For years and years, I had to deal with it. The way he always gave her the benefit of the doubt, raved about her talent, while with me, well.” She snorts, a surprisingly unrefined noise. “You know, the emotional part is always so much harder than the physical anyway. I wasn’t ever in love with my husband in a passionate way. But I did love him. I respected him. I expected some level of devotion at least. A token of appreciation for what I did for him. What I sacrificed.”

“What was that?” Alex winces as she shifts in her bed. She is suddenly dying of thirst. There is a cup just to the side on the table. She reaches her fingers out to it.

“I could have run the whole place. Been editor in chief. Do you think I wanted to be a fucking socialite? To spend my life holding charity functions?” she demands, standing and crossing the room. “My father would never have allowed it though. He always wanted someone like him to take over. But Howard was nothing like him. He was always full of principles”—she makes air quotes with her fingers—“and ideas.” She leans in, confiding in Alex. “Marrying Howard was a perfect way to punish my father while also keeping my hands in the business. I always thought one day I might come back in.”

“Until he hired Francis,” Alex says, feeling a tiny seed of sympathy. To love someone who would never love you back, to be married to them, is a brutal form of punishment.

“She ruined everything. That’s what I thought anyway. My husband was in love with a woman who made everything I’ve worked for, everything I am, disappear. But it’s not true. Of course, I realized it too late. Isn’t that the way these things often go? You said it yourself, didn’t you, Alex?”

Alex almost has it now. Her finger rests on the edge of the cup. Finally Regina sharpens her eyes on her. She crosses over to the little table.

“I have to say, I didn’t expect you to get so involved in all of our drama,” she says, picking up the cup.

Alex’s whole body feels like a wrung-out sponge. She can practically feel the water on her lips, and stretches out her fingers. Instead of handing the cup to her, Regina takes it with her, setting it on a ledge far across the room. She sits again, straightening her pant legs. “But I’m glad you did. Like I said, I’m grateful you helped put Howard in jail. That’s where murderers belong. Now, where were we? Oh, that’s right, I believe we were talking about you keeping your job.”

Alex marvels at how comfortable the woman is with wielding her power. Regina Whitaker doesn’t get caught for crimes. She gets away with them.

Alex hears something at the door and glances past her at the hallway. “And what about the knife?” Alex asks, her voice hoarse.

“What are you talking about?”

“The knife. It was a gift to Howard from you, wasn’t it?” Alex says, thinking of the inscription on the leather case.

“Yes, I gave it to him for our twentieth anniversary. What about it?”

“I found it,” Alex says as Regina’s perfect face falls. “It was under the desk in Francis’s office at the beach house. The police have it now.”

Regina smiles, and Alex watches her chest fall as she exhales, relieved. “You couldn’t have found it. I buried it in the garden.”

There is a moment where she realizes what she’s done. The two of them stare at one another.

Regina blinks. “Oh, please. I’ll just deny it.”

“You can’t,” Alex says, her heart pounding.

“Oh, and why is that?” Regina smirks. A machine next to Alex begins to beep as Regina steps toward her. This is what having no consequences looks like. She is a woman who will do whatever she can to get what she wants, knowing that she will get away with it. She will kill someone. But not right now. Because a slim figure has come to stand in the doorway behind her, quietly slipping into the room through the cracked door.

“Because I heard it, too,” Jonathan says. He stands behind Regina, a bouquet of flowers in his hand.