I loved laundry day. The solitude, the mindlessly busy hands. There was something relaxing and numbing about it. The idyllic repetition of folding and stacking, the soft strands of fabric running through my fingers. Sometimes I would put on my favorite show, hide in the bedroom, and fold the minutes—and the anxiety—away. My brain would shut down while I created tall, neat piles all over the bed. For me, laundry was a cheap, productive form of therapy. Certainly cheaper than the therapist I had stopped seeing months ago, despite what the judge ordered.
The wicker laundry basket that matched the wicker bins I had gotten on sale at Pottery Barn last year—back when I enjoyed shopping, or enjoyed anything, for that matter—sat on one side of me, the other side of me filled with short stacks of clothes. Elise’s bottoms, Elise’s tops. Jackson’s bottoms, Jackson’s tops. Lane’s Windex-blue scrubs in matching sets. As I pulled out a button-down shirt from the bottom of the basket, I gasped.
Ben’s Brooks Brothers oxford work shirt, one of his favorites. Despite its $150 price tag, he said it was worth every penny. So I’d bought him ten. I laughed back then at the frivolity. Now it made me nearly cry because I was homeless, broke, and desperate.
I set the shirt aside. I thought I had donated all of Ben’s clothes to Goodwill, where some lucky bastard would be dressed to the nines in designer wear for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee. I must have missed this one at the bottom of the dirty clothes heap. Pressing the collar against my face, I inhaled the scent of clean linen fabric softener. Ben’s smell had been stripped by detergent, and maybe that was for the best. He didn’t have a particular scent, other than the pungent sweat he soaked the sheets with each night, which I teased him about almost daily. I’d tell him he stunk up the bedding. He’d blame the dog. I’d laugh and remind him we didn’t have a dog. It was our thing. Our banter. Ben was a hot, sweaty sleeper. What I would give for my sheets to be dank with his sweat again.
I wondered if his pillowcase held traces of him. I wondered if I’d find more of him scattered throughout the laundry bins. I wondered when the wondering would end. I hated this part of death, when the ghost lived in your head.
Reaching for another item, my fingers tangled in a pile of lacy underwear. A thong. Who in their right mind enjoyed the sensation of floss riding up their butt crack? Somehow Candace’s dirty clothes always ended up in my wash, which irritated me to no end. Didn’t she realize laundry required organization? Like colors with like colors. Whites with whites. Delicates handled, well, delicately! When she threw a red wool sweater in with the whites, it turned everything pink and shrunk the sweater. It had served her right, but of course I’d been blamed for the sweater that now fit a newborn.
I laid the underwear on her stack of clean clothes, which was taller than the rest.
“Candace!” I yelled to a silent house.
When I got no reply, I glanced out the window and saw her swimming laps. Back and forth, back and forth, in a fluid rhythm of splashing arms and legs. With it only being late May, it was still early in the season for swimming, but that’s what a pool heater is for! she had explained. Never mind that installing the heater had cost more than a car. Although summer was still a month away, it had arrived early this year with temperatures already in the 80s, but when the pool temperature hadn’t yet risen to a balmy warm owing to the chilly nights, Candace had insisted on a heater. And a new pool patio. And a custom pergola. Like every other whim of hers, Lane had obliged and paid extra to have it installed that week.
I want to give her everything life has withheld from her. She’s never had anything of value. Let me spoil her if I want to spoil her, Lane tried to explain when I brought up her extravagant spending. Nothing I said would open his eyes to the truth. I smelled a gold digger, but Lane only smelled her pheromones. At least it kept her out of my hair, her daily routine of sunbathe, swim. Sunbathe, swim. God forbid she spend the time washing her own laundry.
Picking up her teetering pile of clean clothes, I carried it into her bedroom where the bed was a mess and the floor barely visible under all the junk. Clothes, shoes, towels, shopping bags . . . she was a shameless slob. I couldn’t stand my brother being forced to live like this, so I began tidying up her dresser so I could place the clothes on top. Opening her top drawer, I found it was crammed full of assorted clothing with no theme whatsoever. Socks, T-shirts, and shorts all mixed together. My God, the girl had no sense of organization.
As I moved things around, folding and coordinating as I went, a piece of paper crinkled along the bottom of the drawer. Pushing the clothing aside, I pulled it out through the folds of fabric. An ultrasound image. Why would she put a priceless photo like this—the first glimpse of her baby’s face—in the bottom of her drawer? It deserved to be framed. Despite the war between us, our children would be cousins. Even if I couldn’t be a happy sister-in-law, I could be a doting auntie. It wasn’t the baby’s fault her mother was a devious leech.
Maybe as a gesture of goodwill I would frame it for her. I already had an adorable ultrasound frame that would be perfect, a monkey swinging from a tree with the caption It’s a jungle in here! My mother had gotten similar frames for each of my kids—an elephant and a giraffe—but the monkey frame remained empty in a box in my closet.
I examined the picture, remembering back when I had my first ultrasound with Elise. What an exciting day, seeing that blob floating around, a tiny head and arms and legs. And that heartbeat! Who would have known you could see it beating a mile a minute? It made everything inside me feel so . . . real. At that moment I had planned my home, my life, and my future around that tiny person growing inside me.
Well, at least Candace wasn’t lying about the pregnancy. Initially I had my doubts, but this was a good thing. Finally, a truth amid the lies! I traced the speckled white image of the baby against the black background. My brother’s baby. I really was an aunt! If I was going to have a little niece or nephew, I didn’t want a schism. I needed to smooth things over. We did have fun shopping together, didn’t we? Anything was possible.
Taking the ultrasound with me, I headed to my closet and rummaged through several boxes until I found the picture frame at the top, dusty with time. I slipped the thin paper inside, adjusting it just right. As I checked to see how it looked, I noticed the date: the ultrasound was taken the day they got married. I counted the weeks in my head. The math didn’t seem right. In fact, if the date was correct, it put her at almost three months pregnant. This meant she got pregnant a month before she even met Lane.
This meant she lied about everything.
This meant the baby wasn’t Lane’s.
This meant I wasn’t an aunt.
This meant war.
I needed to tell Lane, but he was already overworked and stretched thin. I didn’t know how he was surviving on the four to five hours of sleep he barely got, but at the rate he was going, he was doomed to crash. And crash hard.
I didn’t want to add more to his already full plate of night shifts and home project to-do lists. He’d been picking up double shifts at the hospital to pay for all the extra baby “needs,” as Candace called them. The weekly pregnancy massages, baby yoga classes, and $1,200 baby stroller were hardly necessities, though. If it wasn’t a pair of Jimmy Choos that would last a lifetime, or diamonds that you could pass on to your kids, it wasn’t worth the money. If the baby would spit up on it, poop in it, or spill food on it, you didn’t pay $1,200 for it.
All of these demands for a baby that wasn’t even his.
Before burdening Lane with this new information, I decided I’d do my own digging. I would winnow the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the lies. There were so many puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together when it came to Candace, but what was her ultimate angle? I knew my brother was an easy target for any single woman looking to start a family. He made good money as a nurse, he was handsome and loyal, and he owned his own home, had saved a nice little nest egg, drove a reasonable car. Who wouldn’t want a guy like him? And his best trait also made him the best target: he was trusting to a fault. Even I had taken advantage of that a time or two. But I couldn’t let someone else, someone who wasn’t family, do that to him.
I had two questions for Candace, and I suspected if I unraveled the answers to them, I’d unravel a lot more of her secrets. If the baby wasn’t Lane’s, whose was it? And why was Candace pretending it was Lane’s?