EMMA STARES AT the note. She turns it around. She looks at it again.
Everyone who is lied to must think: How could I have been so stupid? That’s certainly what Emma thinks as she tries to put the story together.
Of course Ben is having an affair with Rebecca. She knew it all along. But she didn’t want to believe it. She should have been in the city more. But… they’ve been renovating the house! Someone had to be there. And how easily Emma complied when she asked to come to a rehearsal, and Ben convinced her not to. He’s always been a little secretive about a work in progress, but this time it’s almost extreme. It would be a distraction, he insisted, and besides, he was saving her opinion, her fresh eye, which he valued so much, for when things were further along. It was important to him that he not tell her as much as he wanted, and that she not ask: who they’ve cast, how the rehearsals are going, fun facts about the costumes, the lighting and the stage design. He wants her to see it as they get nearer opening night. He wants her to be surprised. He wants her to tell him what it might be like for an audience member who knows nothing about the play.
That he valued her opinion meant that she was more than a pregnant woman renovating a country house.
It’s bad enough, his having an affair. But the ink and the handwriting take things to another level.
She ticks off the possibilities. She keeps coming back to the obvious: Whoever wrote that note for Ben either wrote the diary or knew about the diary and imitated the handwriting and the color of the ink.
Did Ben steal the diary for someone who read it and started writing like that?
That seems less likely than that the same person wrote the diary and the note.
Which doesn’t seem likely, either. There’s no way of thinking about this that seems clear, obvious, logical—or like good news.
Someone wrote it and left it in the attic for Emma to find. It had to be Ben. He’d placed it where she couldn’t miss it. She’d tricked herself into thinking she’d excavated it from the rubble. And then he took it back after he knew she’d read it.
Ben and Rebecca. That must be Rebecca’s handwriting. She’s never seen Rebecca’s handwriting. Nobody writes anymore. She’d thought she was reading something written by a ghost.
Why would someone do that to her? Why would Ben and Rebecca need to do that? People have affairs and leave their spouses all the time, even when the wife is pregnant. It’s sad and miserable—but ultimately simple. Sorry, they say. This isn’t working out. I’m not happy. I want to see other people. I met someone.
Why go to the trouble of forging a journal, leaving it for her to read, then making it vanish and waiting for the talent show to tell Emma the punch line?
Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?
Leaving the note here was a mistake. Someone slipped up.
Emma phones Ben. What will she say? What does she expect him to say?
The phone rings and rings.
Ben doesn’t pick up.
He promised.
Emma sits there. And sits there. And sits there.
After a while she feels the lethargy leave her, muscle by muscle, cell by cell. She feels the kind of strength that lets people lift up a car to free someone trapped underneath.
She’ll go to the rehearsal space and find Ben.
She’ll confront him with the note. Make him tell the truth. Make him explain.
Maybe this isn’t as bad as it looks. Maybe it’s some theater thing he forgot to tell her about. Maybe there’s some simple explanation.
It will all make sense. Ben isn’t in love with someone else. No one staged this elaborate… what?
She feels a jutting elbow or knee.
It calms her. Okay. Hello there.
The baby is fine.
Despite everything, she’s thankful for that.
TWO CABS PASS. The drivers take one look at how pregnant Emma is and speed off. Even under her heavy coat, her belly is obvious, and they’re not going to run red lights or deliver a baby in their cab. Emma doesn’t blame them, but she hates them anyway. Isn’t it illegal? It’s cruel. She’s in no shape to write down their license plate numbers. Or take photos on her phone.
Meanwhile, she’s hungry. She’d forgotten about food, about ordering takeout, which—she remembers only now—made her open that drawer in the first place. She never found the Shanghai Garden menu. She found the note instead.
There’s a bakery two blocks away that makes almond croissants. She heads toward Third Avenue. She has to walk slowly; the sidewalks are slippery. A few people—all women—ask if she’s okay, and she says thanks, she’s fine.
Behind the counter a girl with a nose ring flashes Emma a warm smile when she says, “Enjoy it!” Salty, buttery, ridiculously sweet, the pastry is just what Emma wants and needs.
It’s a momentary distraction, and then everything comes roaring back. The note. The handwriting. The journal. Sally’s death. Emma concentrates on breathing.
The third cab driver waits to know where she’s going before he unlocks the door. She gives the address of Ben’s rehearsal space, on West Fifty-First and Ninth. When he’s sure she’s not asking him to drive her to the hospital, he tells her to get in.
He drops her off in front of a big soulless office building. In the lobby, she tells the doorman that she’s the producer’s wife.
“Tenth floor,” he says. “Follow the signs for Studio Space.”
Her hand is trembling so hard she can hardly push the elevator button.
She hears music, singing. Thumping feet.
She’s praying the studio door is unlocked.
For once her prayers are answered.
No one notices her for a while.
She watches from a dark little vestibule just inside the door. The rehearsal hall is huge, bare, with a mirror at one end.
Everyone’s gathered at the center of the loft. Emma can see them, though they can’t see her beyond the light.
Three people are sitting in chairs: Avery, Rebecca, Ben. She recognizes them from the back. Avery’s sitting beside Ben, who’s sitting beside Rebecca. Ben and Rebecca lean their heads together.
So… it’s true. Ben and Rebecca.
Only now Emma focuses on the cast. They have taken a break and are milling around, doing stretches, bending double, squatting on the floor.
Lindsay stands in the center of a semicircle.
Lindsay?
Emma’s head swims. She thinks she might faint.
“Take it from the top,” says Avery.
The rehearsal pianist (Emma can’t see who it is) plays the introduction, and the cast tightens its semicircle around Lindsay, who is singing “I won’t grow up.”
Lindsay puts her hands on her hips in a stagy musical-comedy gesture.
Lindsay doesn’t want to grow up, she doesn’t want to be a man.
Lindsay is so into her part, so inside the song, she doesn’t notice Emma. And Ben, Avery, and Rebecca and everyone else in the rehearsal space are so fixated on Lindsay that no one sees Emma standing there.
Lindsay is the punk Peter Pan, the nonbinary Peter Pan, the hot Peter Pan, the magical creature who will always have hot sex and never grow old. She is Ben’s dream. His old Twitter handle. She is the boy he’d wanted to be, the Peter Pan who wouldn’t age, the boy who doesn’t have a pregnant wife and an expensive renovation project in the country. She is the girl who will stay forever young and whose body won’t age with childbirth and time and—
I won’t grow up, I don’t want to go…
Emma needs to sit down. She grabs a folding chair from against the wall and sets it up. She’s afraid they’ll hear it scrape on the floor, but they’re watching Lindsay, as is Emma.
Avery calls for a break, and Lindsay walks over and twines her arms around Ben’s neck. It’s more than the sexy, play-pretend warmth that theater people affect.
They kiss. It’s real. They’re not acting.
It’s only through sheer force of will that Emma makes herself breathe. She can’t believe what she’s seeing. But whether she believes it or not, that’s what she’s seeing. How can it be true? It can’t be. Ben would never do this. He loves her. They’re having a baby. Which is precisely when men cheat. Why had she thought it couldn’t happen to her? Why had she been so trusting? She’s always laughed at women who spent days each week away from their husbands and then were shocked when the guys found someone else. But Ben? Yes, Ben. Why not? Did she think he was better than that? Well, she did. But, apparently, she thought wrong.
Rebecca says, more bitter than joking, “Okay, you guys, get a room.”
No wonder Avery and Rebecca couldn’t look at Emma at Thanksgiving. They knew who had been cast in the musical. They knew about Ben and Lindsay.
Staring into his eyes, Lindsay gently lays the palm of her hand alongside Ben’s face, and it’s only because Emma’s looking so closely, staring so hard, that she sees the stains on Lindsay’s fingers.
Peacock-blue ink.
It’s her. Lindsay wrote the journal. The note.
Why hadn’t Emma seen the ink on Lindsay’s fingers before? Maybe Lindsay’s gotten sloppy. And why does this shock and sicken Emma more than anything, more than Lindsay being in the musical, more even than Ben sleeping with Lindsay? Unknowns get cast in Broadway shows, men cheat on their pregnant wives. It happens all the time. Even with Ben, even to Emma. But who writes a long, complicated journal, supposedly by someone who lived in the past, and leaves it to seriously mess with the head of the person she knows will find it?
Diabolical is the word that runs through Emma’s mind. She tells herself she’s exaggerating. Lindsay isn’t demonic, just ruthless and ambitious, and maybe a little crazy.
Emma stands. The weight pressing down on her feels heavier than the weight of her body. Something is pulling her, pulling her down.
THE CONTRACTIONS BEGIN, first slow, then faster. Like someone tightening a belt around her, not too tight, then very tight, spitefully letting her know how bad it’s going to get.
Emma needs a doctor.
Now.