Page 26 of Stay Away from Him

I need to talk to someone. With every passing day, my mental health grows worse. I feel like a fraying rope, closer and closer to breaking.

I really ought to get back into therapy. Or—I’m drinking more and more, coming to depend on it—rehab. But Thomas won’t allow that. Doesn’t want me talking to people about what I’m going through. Doesn’t want me airing my problems out for strangers, making him look bad.

No, I can’t talk to a therapist—not without him knowing.

And I certainly can’t talk to Thomas. Can’t be honest with him.

He made that abundantly clear. ( There’s something wrong with you.

You’re not right. You’re crazy .) Amelia isn’t an option either—like the girls, she’s always been more Thomas’s than mine, more loyal to him than she’d ever dream of being to me.

And I don’t have any friends.

***

Okay, so that’s not exactly true. I have one friend. Kind of. Does a person count as a friend when you don’t even like them very much?

Because most of the time, I’m not sure if I like Kelli Walker. Sometimes I actively dislike her. And other times, I’m actually a little bit afraid of her.

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that she likes me.

We met at a school event, a PTA silent auction thing, raising money for something or other.

It was a wine and cheese night, which meant a table of sweaty sliced cheddar, crackers, and boxed red and white on a table by the entrance.

Then, after you got your plastic cup and paper plate, you walked through the gymnasium, looking at the items and deciding what to bid on.

It was the usual—time-shares, free golf lessons, spa packages, baskets of environmentally friendly cleaning products—each prize with a clipboard next to it, for us to write down our bids.

I wandered between the tables, then stopped at one.

The prize was a collection of paintings by a local woman—a mom at the middle school Kendall attended.

I didn’t recognize the woman’s name. What drew my eye were the paintings, five of them, each propped on a gold-lacquered wooden stand, so they stood upright on the table.

At first glance they looked like treacly watercolors of nature scenes: flowers, ponds, long grasses, autumn leaves.

The kinds of paintings my classmates and I would have made fun of in art school, dismissed as kitsch.

But something about the paintings pulled at me.

Particularly one, showing a small frozen lake, brown leafless trees, a path, and a gray sky above.

An unfinished quality to the brushstrokes gave the piece the feeling of a dream.

And on the path, so small I had to squint to see it, was the hint of a figure I somehow knew to be a woman, the ends of a red scarf blowing out behind her.

I looked at her, struggling against the wind under that ugly sky, and thought about the person I’d been before I’d gotten married, before I’d even met Thomas.

When I’d been a painter. I hadn’t put hand to brush in years, and I felt an overpowering grief at losing who I’d been.

I thought that maybe the figure in that painting was her, the me I’d have been if I’d chosen the road not taken.

She was cold and alone, struggling against a harsh wind, but I thought she was happy.

And I was jealous of her—just as I was jealous of the woman, the woman I didn’t know, who’d painted these paintings.

I felt a presence next to me, and I turned to see someone standing there. I didn’t know her. I only knew that she hadn’t painted the paintings in front of me—there was a little photo on a placard on the table, and the faces didn’t match.

“What do you think?” asked the woman. There was a sneer in her voice.

“I hate them.” I felt bad as soon as I said it—it wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t the whole truth. I didn’t hate the paintings. I only hated how they made me feel as though I’d died long ago.

But then the woman next to me cackled low and leaned in to press her shoulder conspiratorially against mine. I glanced at her, and her eyes sparkled with cruel glee.

“I know,” she said. “It looks like a four-year-old drew them. You should meet the woman who paints them. She’s so full of herself.

Thinks she’s an artiste.” The last word she said with a mocking flamboyance, and when I glanced at her, she’d pinched the fingers and thumb of one hand together, as though she was holding an imaginary teacup, or perhaps a cigarette—I didn’t know which, and maybe she didn’t either.

“You want to get out of here and get a real glass of wine? Something better than this boxed shit?”

***

Here is what I’ve learned about Kelli Walker in the year and a half since I’ve known her.

She claims to love her family—while having a husband she doesn’t seem to care for very much and two unruly sons who treat her with open contempt.

She likes to drink, likes to laugh, eats a bit too much, struggles with her weight, ten pounds she constantly claims to want to lose.

She is fun—but her idea of fun usually involves complaining about someone else.

She’s unhappy but likes it, treats unhappiness as a kind of sport.

She has causes: virulently opposes new housing developments in the area, hates her elderly neighbor’s yappy dog.

She listens to my complaints about Thomas.

It is her favorite thing to talk about: the problem with Thomas.

This fits with her general negative demeanor, the joy she takes in talking about everything she does not like—but, strangely, the one time she met my husband, she flirted with him openly.

I think she might believe that if we were ever to split up, she’d be able to hate-fuck him while also having me entirely to herself.

She is fiercely loyal, but God help you if you’re one of her enemies.

She calls the cops on people for the smallest infractions, maintains deep resentments with a handful of acquaintances and neighbors, and I’m pretty sure she poisoned that dog, the yappy one that lives next door.

(I don’t know this for sure, but she was a little too joyful when she told me it ate something bad and got sick.)

She is also, I believe, obsessed with me.

Ever since that first day, the day when we made fun of that poor woman’s paintings together and then went out for a glass of wine, she contacts me a few times a week, asking if I can come out for coffee, a drink, dinner—and her favorite activity, shit-talking.

I don’t particularly enjoy her company, and there are days when I wish I’d never gone for that drink with her, but she is the only person I can really talk to, the only person who will receive my darkest, angriest thoughts and not shame me for them.

The only thing that scares me is what she’d do if I ever gave her cause to turn on me. If I went from being a person she thinks of as her friend, to someone on her ever-growing list of enemies.