A Woman Alone Read online

  My problems in those days came not so much from Therese as from the teenagers at my new school. Sure, the bullying no longer reached such extremes as before, I wasn’t spat on anymore or considered to be contaminated. In the new school district, there was no one to remember the plain-bread lunches. But even with money for the cafeteria, I struggled to get my peers to accept me. At thirteen years old, cliques were forming, and I was a new girl and altogether unremarkable. I might not have been mocked anymore but I was quietly excluded, and disregarded.

  I had my eye on a clique in particular, led by a girl named Sophie who had everything a thirteen-year-old girl could want. For weeks, she interacted with her group of loyal vassals while I went mad with envy. Like the others, she didn’t so much bully me as ignore me, regarding me as an interchangeable piece of the backdrop—one of many extras in what she, like a lot of prettier-than-average girls her age, regarded as the Sophie Show. And I was determined to be more than that.

  By then, I thought I knew my worth: my too-big, slightly crooked front teeth and mothlike, washed-out coloring disqualified me from being considered beautiful. Which left me one other avenue toward conquering Sophie’s heart. One day, I snuck into Therese’s purse and retrieved a handful of twenties from her wallet. The next day, my heart hammering, I approached my idol and suggested we hit the makeup aisle at the nearby drugstore during lunch. I bought Sophie lip glosses, eye shadow, and some kind of special crazy-expensive mascara and handed over all the cash without so much as flinching. That day had to be the best of my life because I was allowed to sit with her and her friends. Sure, they talked over my head like I wasn’t there, except I was there, and nothing could take that away.

  Until the next day, that is, when Sophie went back to acting like I didn’t exist and rebuffed my attempts to join her and her clique with open mockery. She was wearing the mascara. It made her lashes look like fuzzy spider legs.

  Therese noticed the missing money, of course. She confronted me that same day when I got back from school, bewildered and discouraged.

  “I know you took it,” Therese said, in a deceptively calm voice she only used when she was three seconds away from exploding. “Just tell me what you spent it on, and you won’t get in trouble.”

  I knew that to be less than true so I just kept my mouth shut.

  “What did you spend it on, you little fiend? Was it drugs?” She grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me toward her, yanking me so hard that I lost my balance and dropped to my knees. The impact made us both flinch. I looked up at her; she looked down at me.

  “Let go of me,” I said calmly. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else, I’ll call Dana and tell her you hit me again.”

  And then I saw that look in her eyes. The look that meant I had won forever. She was disturbed and powerless and even frightened. She let go of my sleeve. I got up and went to my room.

  “You’re cursed,” I heard her say softly to my back as I walked away. “That’s what you are. You’re a curse.”

  And yet, I’ll have everything I want, I thought, seething. Just watch me.

  Needless to say, Scott doesn’t know about any of it. And not because I think he’d judge me. On the contrary, he’d be horrified if I told him about the old church days, about the place where I grew up. But I don’t want him to think of me like that.

  As for Therese, he met her precisely once, and that was enough for him to agree that she shouldn’t be invited to our wedding. I now go visit her twice a year, and that’s more than enough. I’m actually a couple months overdue but it’s the last thing on my mind.

  My second experience with a shrink was right after the home invasion. I only lasted the five appointments recommended to prevent PTSD, and even then, I have no idea if it helped or not.

  But contrary to what I told Scott, I didn’t quit because I didn’t think she was good enough. Quite the opposite. I quit because I felt like she was a bit too good. Eerily so. By the second appointment, she teased out of me the full story of my childhood, which I happily spilled. Including the crucial lie I told that time, a long time ago.

  Maybe in the heat of the moment, it seemed to me that it didn’t matter anymore, after so long. She sure made it sound that way. Children lie, she said matter-of-factly. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But as soon as the door of the shrink’s office closed after me that afternoon, I was seized by a deep-seated malaise, stricken by the feeling that I had made a terrible mistake. I cruised through the remaining three sessions, always on high alert and very self-aware, and then I was done so I never came back.

  From the outside, the office of Dr. Stockman fits into the neighborhood seamlessly, a sleek chrome-and-glass building. In the lobby, it houses a coffee shop, and the neighbors are a bakery and a flower shop. Taryn spots the cakes in the window display and, of course, immediately points her finger. “Want!”

  I glance at Scott in alarm. If she decides to have another meltdown in the middle of the street, I’m officially at a loss for what to do. But he scoops her up playfully and spins her, and she forgets about the cakes. A little too quickly, I’d say, and I’m seized by a momentary feeling of jealousy that makes me ashamed.

  Maybe I can bring that up with Dr. Stockman too.

  We go up a small flight of stairs to the second floor, and as soon as we go through the discreet door with the silver plaque reading ALICE STOCKMAN PHD, it’s like we’re in a different world.

  Everything here is cozy and old-timey. There’s a hardwood floor that looks appropriately worn—they must have brought it in from somewhere else because five years or however long this place existed isn’t long enough for this degree of wear and tear. There’s the requisite Impressionist art print on the wall in a simple frame. The armchairs are vintage, and there’s a throw rug and a coffee table piled with actual books.

  Dr. Alice Stockman, whom I recognize at once because she looks exactly like the photo on the website, comes out to greet us herself. No assistants or receptionists or any other background characters to make us, the patients, extra nervous about who else has access to everything that’s wrong with us. The woman greets us warmly but without excess, and addresses Taryn with the same collected calm. No baby talk, no squatting to be at her level. Dr. Stockman inclines her head. “And you must be Taryn. Look, Taryn, we have a wonderful playroom here, filled with all kinds of interesting toys. Do you want to check it out?”

  At the prospect of toys, Taryn, who’s returned to sulking, perks up again. She follows Dr. Stockman to one of the two doors with nary a backward glance at me, her mother. I follow on their heels, feeling rather unwelcome.

  Dr. Stockman opens the door to a playroom that’s right out of my own childhood. Well, not so much mine but one that someone my age or a little older might have had. There are toys, all right: old-school wooden blocks and puzzles, a toy pony, a castle, stuffed animals that belong in my own childhood, if not my mother’s. None of the sleek, techy educational toys like they have at the day care, and not a screen in sight.

  Taryn will have a fit, I think, and brace myself for the inevitability. But, to my surprise, Taryn’s eyes widen in sheer wonderment, and she throws herself at the toys with a shriek of joy.

  I look, incredulous, from her to Dr. Stockman. The woman gives a reserved smile. “It’s something new,” she says in a low voice. “It’s always interesting for them to discover things they’ve never seen before.”

  Indeed. I feel a bit ashamed to admit she’s right. Lately, Taryn pretty much only plays on her tablet.

  “We’re not leaving her here all alone, are we?” I ask. “You see, she had a little behavior issue the other day—”

  “We’ll get to all of that,” Dr. Stockman says. “And of course we’re not leaving her completely alone.”

  I follow her gaze and notice a mirror on the wall. A little too high to be at a toddler’s face level. “Oh,” I say. I expected a camera or something—something more sophisticated than a sim
ple one-way mirror.

  “Sometimes simple is best,” says Dr. Stockman as she guides us into her office. It makes me like her. Then it makes me wonder if it was all calculated expressly for that purpose.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I want you to feel like you can be completely honest within these walls,” Dr. Stockman says. “I want you to feel that this is a place of trust. And for that, there are no surveillance devices anywhere in the office. No sensors, detectors, cameras of any kind. And, with your permission, I’ll tape our sessions. On my own tape recorder.” She holds it out to me, as if inviting me to take it and examine it. Scott picks it up and turns it around in his hands.

  “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he says. “Not since, like, high school.”

  “Can we refuse?”

  “Of course you can. But I guarantee that the recordings will never be used by anyone except me, and only so I can design the best treatment plan and follow your progress. You’re free to refuse but it would greatly simplify my life if you didn’t.”

  “Record away,” says Scott generously. Without consulting me. Without even a sideways glance at me.

  “Cecelia?”

  I grit my teeth. They both put me in the position to be the killjoy, and I’m not taking the bait. “Okay.”

  “Great. Then how about we start talking about what brings you here?” She presses a button on the recorder, which clicks loudly. “Cecelia, Scott, and Taryn Holmes,” she says in a loud, clear voice. “Session One.”

  I cast a glance at the one-way mirror to see Taryn rocking on the toy horse. I can’t hear anything but I can tell she’s yelling in delight. When was the last time she acted like this at home? She stares silently at that tablet for hours, poking at the screen with her little stubby fingers without so much as a giggle.

  “Taryn had an episode at day care,” I say. “But don’t you know everything already?”

  “How would I know everything, Cecelia?”

  “Well, you work for IntelTech.”

  “I do not work for IntelTech. I have my office at SmartBlock. I do not work for SmartBlock. So I’d like to hear everything from you. And how about you start at the very beginning? Something tells me all three of you wouldn’t be here if this was about a simple day care tantrum.”

  I feel my face color. “Fine,” I say. “It all started a year and a half ago.”

  * * *

  That’s not exactly true. It started way more than a year ago. It started the day we made that stupid, disastrous, fateful decision to renovate our house. The house I loved, the house I called home. Really, it was Scott who made the decision—I just went along with it to keep the peace. After all, he’d be paying for it. My little ebook covers could never pay for more than the most basic groceries and a phone bill on a good month. And so Scott was the one who shopped around for contractors.

  That’s when the first signs of trouble appeared, although we conveniently didn’t see them. Scott’s resolve not to pinch pennies, to get the best of the best and to hell with the cost—well, that began to melt faster than the ice caps as soon as we got our first estimate. It was a big firm, the one with the full-page ads in the glossy home décor publications. A household name—pun intended. A couple of guys came around, measured things, tap-tapped the walls and floor, and gave Scott a number that made my eyes pop.

  The next firm, not as flashy, could only knock off a couple of thousand dollars from the total bill—which was a lot, sure, but not on the scale we were talking about. That evening at dinner, Scott looked defeated and began to talk about maybe making compromises on the materials. Did we really need hardwood cabinets and flooring? Imitations now look just as good and last twice as long.

  But I could hear in his voice how dejected it made him. Scott prided himself on being the perfect provider, on being able to supply his family with anything and everything they might want. Even though, for the time being, that family consisted only of me. And now he had to make concessions, settle for fake marble and plywood shelves.

  And so I decided to help out. I still wonder what would have happened if I’d just left it alone. Maybe we would have coped with the cheap materials or, better yet, abandoned the project altogether. But I wasn’t sure how Scott would deal with such a blow to his ego in the long term, and so I scoured the internet for companies until I finally found the one, on the fourteenth page of Google results. Benning and Co. Renovations and Repairs. Your Needs, Met and Exceeded.

  I sent Scott the link. We called them for an evaluation and a quote. They told us they could make it happen—hardwood and all, and the skylight, and the quartz bathroom counters. All within our budget, give or take a few thousand dollars. The guy the company was named after sounded convincing enough, and we let ourselves be convinced because we wanted—needed—to be convinced. We didn’t let ourselves wonder just where he was cutting corners. Because obviously he had to cut corners somewhere.

  And so the contract was signed, and Benning’s men came to renovate the house. This drew itself out over several months, instead of the two we’d agreed on in the contract. Things just kept going wrong. Materials didn’t arrive on time, or arrived defective; some old-house quirk got discovered at the worst possible time, bringing the work to a screeching halt until they could figure out what to do. We had to spend additional thousands to repair some electrical wiring we had no idea was faulty.

  “Those damn old houses,” Scott groused, “always full of things like that. What we should have done is knocked it over and built a new one. Spared ourselves all the bullshit.”

  I didn’t point out we didn’t have anything close to the budget needed to do that. To say nothing of the ton of paperwork required by the city.

  “At least we found out about it, right? The house could have gone up in flames like a box of matches any moment.”

  But finally, after nearly six months, it was all done. Finished. The narrow hallway and little rooms gave way to a modern, sleek, open space filled with bright white light from brand-new fixtures. Hardwood floors glimmered darkly with fresh lacquer. It all looked like something out of a magazine, and it left a sad emptiness within me, like an old friend who changed irrevocably and without warning.

  This would turn out to be the least of my problems.

  Because what we didn’t realize was that the shady crew of Benning and Co., shorted on pay, would make a copy of the key we gave them. That they cased our house.

  They waited more than a year so we’d put them out of our mind. Then one of them came back.

  The only thing that went wrong in his plan was that my daughter and I were home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Through the one-way mirror, I watch Taryn play as if on mute. She’s abandoned the toy horse and is now stacking cubes, piling them up as high as she can and then knocking them over with a kick.

  “And you didn’t seek therapy after the incident?” asks Dr. Stockman.

  “I did. It didn’t really stick.”

  “I mean for Taryn.”

  “Taryn was just a baby,” I say, feeling defensive. “She can’t possibly remember.”

  “But maybe it affected her subconsciously,” Scott pipes up. “I always said so.” And he looks from the doctor to me and back, waiting for her to agree, like the teacher’s pet that he always has been.

  Dr. Stockman charitably ignores him and focuses her attention on me. “So do you think this incident could have been behind the tantrum?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, irritated. “They were learning about stranger danger that day. Or something like that. Whatever they call it nowadays.”

  “That could have played into it. But I’ll speak to Taryn separately. What I’d like to know is, could this incident be behind your unease with your new home?”

  “What?” I’m taken aback. That’s not what it’s about. That’s not why I’m here. I didn’t agree to this.

  “Your husband mentioned that on the phone,” she explains. There’s somethi
ng behind the gentleness of her voice. It makes my hair stand on end.

  “Scott,” I say.

  “Yes, so I did say something,” he concedes. I could swear he’s embarrassed. “I was just— It’s been exasperating, dealing with you lately. All this complaining about the glitches—”

  “Complaining?” I exclaim. “I’m not complaining. There are glitches. Not just annoying but dangerous glitches.”

  “Did you follow the necessary steps?” asks Dr. Stockman.

  “Damn right I followed the necessary steps,” I snap. “Can we please stop? I’m not on trial here.”

  “No one is on trial. We’re just trying to unpack things.”

  “Well, in that case, please unpack my daughter’s strange behavior. And leave me out of it.”

  “You’re her mother,” Scott cuts in. “Her behavior has everything to do with you. And your neuroses.”

  “Mr. Holmes,” Dr. Stockman speaks up, “please, don’t cast blame. Cecelia, I just want to understand your feelings about your new house. Forget about the glitches for a minute. Imagine there are no glitches. That everything is perfect. Imagine IntelTech sends a repairman—”

  “They don’t have repairmen. They have these creepy robotic assistants and mediators and—”

  “Let’s pretend. They send a repairman, and there’s never again a single glitch in the house. Will you be happy then?”

  I think about it. Was I happy before the weirdness began?

  Hardly.

  I think the look on my face is answer enough for her.

  “Do you have trouble feeling like you’re at home, Cecelia? It’s never a good feeling.”

  “I came here,” I say, “to feel safe. I was supposed to feel safe. But I don’t.”

  “What do you feel, if not safe?”