Page 9 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

I avoided looking at Noah’s things, which was easier than it might’ve been with other men, as he left little decorative impression on the space around him.

Before he moved in with me, he was living with two roommates who were fellow medical residents.

Their house was utilitarian. They ate; they slept; they returned to work.

Doctors, I’d noticed, were prone to a kind of pragmatism that could lead to an empty life.

Noah moved in with me after only a few weeks of dating.

All he brought with him were clothes, and gym equipment that he stored in the garage.

It made sense when I visited his childhood home, where his father was a nearly invisible presence.

I didn’t mind, because it meant that the town house both financially and visually continued to belong to me.

It was my father’s death that allowed me to buy the townhome.

The money was a surprise, for a variety of reasons.

I’d never thought my family was poor when I was growing up, because my parents were prone to extravagance.

As a small child, I’d eaten in more five-star restaurants than most people had in their entire lives.

In between such meals, however, I often went hungry.

My parents were good at bringing in sums of money, and even better at spending them immediately.

Neither of them could hold down a steady job for longer than a year, resorting to conning their way into the kinds of luxurious environments that they preferred.

They had no retirement savings to speak of—something that would prove to be unnecessary anyway—and whatever was left in their accounts had gone to lawyers during the trial.

The only inheritance I’d received was a stack of handwritten papers with a note labeling it as my father’s manifesto and stating that in the event of his passing, it was my duty to get it published.

When I was twenty-one I burned all the pages without ever reading them. Some things were better left unseen.

It wasn’t until years after his death that I learned about the money.

It had been held up in court due to the dubious legality of its origins.

I had no doubt that it had been acquired through nefarious means, but eventually it was cleared and made its way to me.

I wasn’t too proud to take the funds and use them on a town house, though it did cast my hunger in a new light.

That there were days when I’d gone without eating, and that I frequently wore clothes that were ill fitting and that my classmates judged weird, was a choice .

The sum wasn’t so much that I could afford something huge or centrally located, and unfortunately my parents’ method of charming their way into housing didn’t work on mortgage brokers, but the town house, with its gray walls and neutral floors, was nice in a way that appealed to me.

The normalness of it made me feel normal.

“A town house,” my mother scoffed when I told her. “Those places have no personality. You should’ve invested in something classy.”

I didn’t bring up the roach-infested motel that we briefly lived in when I was seven. There was no point in rehashing the past with someone who refused to acknowledge the wrongs that she’d done.

I was cleaning the bathroom when the call came in. All the calls started the same way, with a robotic voice notifying me that I was receiving a call from the Northport Correctional Facility.

“My darling?” My mother’s voice came through the line.

She rarely referred to me by my name, and she absolutely refused to call me by my preferred nickname of Lexie, because, she said, it sounded “trashy.” Instead, she used pet names—“honey” or “sweet” or “darling.” A stranger might have interpreted it as a sign of affection, but I knew better.

It was simply another method of erasure.

“Hi.” I struggled with what to call her. When she was arrested, I was still young enough that I called her “Mommy.” In the rare moments when I mentioned her to other people, I called her “my mother.” Usually I avoided referring to her at all.

“You sound stressed,” she said.

I brought the phone into the living room and sat on the couch.

The nice thing about Noah’s absence was that it meant I didn’t have to hide while I talked to my mother.

On the Sundays when he wasn’t at work or the gym, I’d frequently found myself sitting in my car, in the garage, so that he wouldn’t be able to hear her voice through the phone speaker.

I wasn’t sure if I was worried that she would scare him or woo him, but either way was a situation to be avoided.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “Just an ordinary Sunday.”

“And how is your fiancé?”

“He’s good. Great. At work.”

There were no circumstances in which I would admit to my mother what Noah and Molly had done to me.

Though she’d never spoken to him, my mother was obsessed with Noah.

She called him “your fiancé” because she didn’t know his name.

I avoided telling her too many details about my life, because I worried what she might do with them.

She didn’t know which state I lived in or what I did for work.

Sometimes I was tempted to tell her that I was a matchmaker, because I thought she would be charmed.

I still think about watching movies with you.

I’ve made helping people find love my entire life, as though I can replicate the experience.

I resisted only because I knew my mother’s penchant for destroying people, a hobby that went past murder.

I hadn’t intended even to tell her that I was engaged. I’d made it through an entire year of dating before the word “boyfriend” had slipped out during a conversation, and she’d latched on, wanting to know everything about him, or at minimum, everything that I was willing to give.

“A doctor!” she’d exclaimed.

“Tall!”

“Attractive!”

She’d treated him like an accomplishment, something greater than my degree or career. She filled in the gaps, what I refused to tell her, with plotlines from romantic comedies, sometimes confusing my life with the lives of the protagonists of Love Actually or 27 Dresses . I never corrected her.

When she found out I was engaged, her tone was almost chastising.

“Finally,” she’d said. “I can’t believe it took you so long.” And then she proceeded to ask me a million questions that I couldn’t answer about the wedding.

I knew how she would react if I told her that Noah had left me for my best friend. She’d think I was pathetic. How could you let that happen? she would say. She tended to blame me for all my misfortunes. So instead of telling her the truth, I lied.

“I picked out a wedding cake,” I said.

There had been no cake. No sweetness.

“Wonderful. What kind?”

“Red velvet. I like the color.”

“Chocolate is better. You should do chocolate.”

From there, she launched into a monologue in which she described all the best cakes she’d ever eaten.

The blood came out of nowhere.

“A woman was stabbed today,” she said, without warning.

I was silent. I’d learned that a response would only encourage her.

She wanted to shock me. It was the same thing she’d done to the other mothers at school pickup when I was a kid.

Your husband looks like he has a big dick , or Oh, you live in that part of town?

I knew someone whose sister was murdered there.

She was happiest when everyone around her was off-kilter, because it meant she held control of the situation.

“Someone got ahold of a pencil. Very resourceful. Anything can be a knife if you want it enough, you know. It was very messy. That’s the problem with inferior tools—they do the job, but it’s harder to clean up after. They took her to the infirmary. We’re still waiting to see if she lived.”

I didn’t quite trust the “someone” at the beginning of the sentence.

It was a way of deflecting. Someone could be another inmate.

Someone could be my mother. I’d learned to read between the lines.

I could’ve authored a biography with all the stories that she’d told me during our phone calls over the years.

At times, when I was particularly financially pressed, I was tempted by the possibility.

However, I knew that my mother, in any form, shouldn’t be released into the world.

I was relieved when she said, “I must go, my sweet.”

“Bye.”

Neither of us spoke of love. We didn’t have a relationship like that.

Mothers showed up on reality television a lot.

Viewers enjoyed seeing the people who created the cast members they were obsessed with.

Sometimes the mothers were such a hit that their popularity surpassed that of their children.

Any strife that might’ve existed between parent and child was concealed for the cameras.

She’s my whole world, the stars liked to say.

More than their fame, their money, their looks, their mothers made me envious.

I wanted a mother like that. Someone I could describe as a best friend.

A relationship that was palatable enough for television outside of true crime documentary.

When I said that my mother was my world, what I meant was that I couldn’t escape her. She tinged everything I did, regardless of the distance between us.

Though we were separated by a multitude of states, part of me was convinced that my mother could see my every movement. I worried that she somehow knew what had happened with Noah and Molly, knew that I had spent my night blacked out with strangers.

You’re such a disappointment, I could hear her saying long after we ended the call. It was stupid how much I still wanted to please her. At what age, I wanted to know, did a child stop longing for their parents’ love?