WHEN LINDSAY’S DAD gives her the Hideaway Home listing, she posts it as a joke. Let’s see what crawls out from under a rock to take a look at this one. Some ancient longhair hippie ghost hunter, some secret cult with twelve half-starved kids. There’s a bit of that around here, but no one’s got the cash or the time or interest to take on the renovation of a semi-ruined dry-out clinic in the middle of nowhere. Not one Williamsburg hipster, not one ex-urban pioneer shows up. No one emails or texts or calls. No one spends more than fifteen seconds on the listing.
Maybe some rich cutting-edge hotelier, your Andre or Ian or whoever, will renovate the place and make this the new celebrity luxury destination. Sullivan County, the new Hamptons? Lindsay seriously doubts it. But it gives her a reason to bother, and it’s sort of fun, exploring the crazy wrecked house with Beth, snapping pictures on their phones while Beth, who’s better with words, comes up with the text of the listing. They even have sex on the cleanest-looking bed in the least disgusting bedroom. It’s creepy but weirdly hot.
Poor Beth has done nothing to deserve whatever Lindsay is going to do. Beth is a deeply good person who has no idea where any of this will be going. And what her role in it will be. All Beth wants is to settle down and have a nice life with Lindsay and find work she likes, maybe something to do with writing. Beth told Lindsay the joke about the lesbian bringing the moving van on the second date. Beth says she basically brought the van years before their first date. She’d had a crush on Lindsay in high school, but Lindsay hadn’t noticed.
Beth self-identifies as a gay woman, but Lindsay doesn’t. She doesn’t self-identify as a straight woman. She doesn’t self-identify as bisexual. She doesn’t self-identify as anyone but herself.
Lindsay had been living in New York, sharing a crappy apartment with a stoner trust-fund-baby roommate, waitressing at a sports bar in Chelsea, hefting trays of beer mugs through crowds of frat bros who grabbed her ass but tipped really well if they were drunk enough. She took acting classes she couldn’t afford and went out on auditions, and looked around the classes and auditions and thought, Not one of us is ever going to get an acting job. Now she thinks: Maybe her negativity was the problem. People smell it. She never got one callback. Not one. Most of the men she met were gay or married or both. Some of the more powerful guys had creepy sexual kinks, and that was a real acting challenge: getting out of the room without turning them against you forever.
If only to fight the boredom, she had two affairs. One, that lasted almost six weeks, was with a woman, supposedly some second-string producer’s PA. The woman was a redhead, pretty, and the sex was hot, but when it became clear that the woman, Rachel, wasn’t going to do any of the things she’d promised to do, things that would have helped Lindsay in her acting career, Lindsay broke it off. Rachel’s guilty quality made for great sex, but she was jealous and neurotic, and finally the sex wasn’t worth it.
Once, when they were showering together, Lindsay noticed that Rachel, who was always suntanned, had been covering the bare white band of skin around her left ring finger with makeup that washed off in the water. As if Lindsay didn’t know she was married.
The second affair was with a good-looking stagehand she met when she tried out for one of the parts she didn’t get. When she got pregnant, he ghosted her. Things did not go well. There was an injury, an infection. She terminated what was left of her pregnancy in a clinic in Murray Hill, walking past demonstrators who shoved posters of bloodied babies at her and tried to make her cry. They succeeded, but that was the last time she cried. She promised herself: No more tears. Not ever. The doctors told her she couldn’t have children. They told her that in no uncertain terms. The less she remembers about all that, the better.
That was when she began trawling AA meetings. It was where you could meet rich needy guys. They would take you out to good dinners, and when they started drinking again, which they often did, they even gave Lindsay cash. None of this was supposed to happen. She wasn’t even supposed to hang out with them outside the meetings, but once you started breaking the AA rules, anything was possible.
She’d been surprised to see Beth, whom she knew from high school, at one of the AA meetings. That night they went back to Beth’s tiny East Village apartment. The sex was amazing.
Lindsay has never told anyone how she feels about sex. Basically, it goes like this: You do things to a person that feel good, and then the person does things to you that feel good, and, as if that wasn’t enough, you get that great toe-curling electrical buzz and the little aftershocks. You’re grateful to the person who made that happen, but that isn’t love. Not that Lindsay has any idea what love is. She lets others assume she does. She even says “I love you.” It doesn’t matter who she says it to, if it isn’t true.
After a few months together, Lindsay and Beth admitted they were poor and unemployed and should probably move back upstate until they figured out something better. Beth got a job making pocket change at the historical society. When Ted took Lindsay into his real estate business—he was so nice about it—she couldn’t let him see how miserable it made her. She convinced herself that working for her dad wasn’t the end of the world, not the dead end of her acting dream or even a serious defeat, but just a stage she was going through. A time-out. A process.
Living with Beth is okay for now. Lindsay pretends to have been a vegetarian and gone back to being a carnivore to make Beth happy. Beth likes that, and Lindsay lets her think it. So what if it isn’t true? Lindsay has always loved a fat juicy burger.
The town is backward, but not so old-fashioned that anyone has a problem with Lindsay and Beth being a couple. Though Virginia, the Nibble Nook waitress and Lindsay’s second cousin, keeps asking Lindsay, right in front of Beth, when she’s going to find a nice guy and settle down and get married.
None of this is Lindsay’s destiny.
Something else will happen.
IF THERE’S SUCH a thing as destiny, and Lindsay believes there is, destiny chooses Ben to be the first and only sucker who calls about the house.
First she thinks of him as The Client, then as The Husband, and after a while it’s Ben. First it’s The Client’s Wife, then The Wife, then Emma. That’s what it means to get to know someone. Names are hard, though she likes her own name. Lindsay could be a girl or a boy. She understands perfectly when—later—Ben tells her that he and Emma can’t agree on a name for the baby.
It’s not a good sign about the marriage, which is just what Lindsay wants to hear.
During that first phone conversation with Ben, Lindsay gives the house the best possible spin. She plays the not-too-bright novice country real estate broker, which in a way she is, except for the not-too-bright part. She’s a trained actress, but you don’t need much training to know that if you put a question mark at the end of every sentence, guys will think you’re dumb.
Anyway, Ben will find out the truth about the house soon enough. One showing will do it.
She says, “Can I ask what you do for a living?”
He says, “I’m a producer.”
Her heart does a little trippy dance. “Can I ask what you produce?”
He says, “Why don’t you google me?”
Lindsay thinks that anyone obnoxious enough to say “google me” deserves everything he gets. Ben’s still on the phone when she searches him on her laptop, and when his bio comes up, she realizes this isn’t just a half-assed real estate inquiry.
This is destiny calling.
Lindsay says, “Can I tell you the truth? It’s a major reno project? But it’s the craziest, most beautiful house you will ever see in your life?”
She’s betting a lot on this one.
“When can I come see it?”
Bingo. She used to play baseball as a kid, before the idiot Little League coach told her that girls didn’t do that. Hearing the client rise to the bait feels like that fabulous thump when the ball lands square in your mitt.
This guy could be an end run around everything she has ever tried and failed at. All that time and money she wasted taking drama lessons and auditioning when all she had to do was sell a house to the right producer.
Ben tells Lindsay that the first time he comes up to see the house, he’ll come alone. He isn’t sure his wife will like it, and he doesn’t want to waste her time.
Something in his tone tells Lindsay that she should wear something… minimal… to the showing. Her flimsiest, shortest summer dress, though it’s still chilly. A leather biker jacket for warmth.
BEN DRIVES A Volvo. A good sign. And he seems charmed by her sad little Prius, not that he’d want to drive one.
He notices and appreciates how she’s dressed. She’s shivering for his benefit. Does she want to borrow his scarf?
He’s not bad-looking, not good-looking. A little nerdy for her taste, but fine. He’s not repellent. Not an obvious pervert or creep. Basically, he’s not a bad guy. A potential cheating husband, but whatever. She can work with what’s here. Right now she doesn’t want a man who’s smarter or thinks faster than she does.
From the moment he drapes his deliciously soft cashmere scarf around her neck, it’s more up close and personal than your typical house tour. He trails behind Lindsay through the wreck of the house. He looks at her. He looks at the house. He looks at her. He looks at her ass. He looks at the house.
He likes what he sees.
The noises he makes from the moment they enter the hall—little grunts and moans of pleasure—make Lindsay wonder if those are the sounds he makes during sex. She doesn’t want to find out, but she senses that if she wants things to go her way, she may have to. It’s positively orgasmic, his reaction to the house, and—just as she expected—when she brings him into the theater, that does it.
He basically comes.
“A theater! And old-fashioned theater, in a private house. You do know I’m a theater person?”
Has he forgotten that he told her to google him?
“Sure! Congratulations. On your big Broadway hit.”
“It wasn’t an overnight success,” he says. “First came years of work, years of failure.”
He thinks he knows about failure? Lindsay could teach him a thing or two, and maybe she will, before this is over.
“It’s just so romantic,” he keeps saying, as they drift from room to room. Did he mean the house or Lindsay? He goes on about how amazing the house could be with just a little work. She lets him talk. She listens. She smiles. He’s doing her job for her. Personally, she thinks it’s bad luck for a guy in the theater to buy a place that’s soaked up years of the bad vibes of Broadway burnouts. But she’s not going to say that.
Lindsay says, “I always tell clients that the renovation is going to take three times as long and cost five times as much as they imagine.” She’s never told any clients any such thing. She’s never actually had any clients.
“So I hear,” says Ben.
So it must be something Realtors say. Lindsay’s thinking of all the acting classes she took. She’s playing the good-girl country Realtor.
And soon she’ll play the bad-girl country Realtor.
“Oh… and one more thing.” Lindsay’s operating on pure instinct now.
“What’s that?”
“If you buy this place, you’re probably going to want to get a pickup truck.”
He lights up, his face just lights up. Lindsay thinks he’s going to grab her and kiss her right then and there. Okay, that might be a bit premature. But the thought is in his mind.
“I’ve always wanted a pickup.” Of course he has.
“If not now, when?” Lindsay’s smile beams freedom, promise, and the assurance that he’s the macho pickup-truck guy he’s always dreamed of being. His dumb grin makes Lindsay realize how easy this will be.
“You mentioned… you’re married,” she says.
Is he hesitating? Does he think this is that scene where the husband stashes his wedding ring in his pocket and picks her up in a bar? No married guy buys a house without consulting the wife.
“Actually… she’s pregnant. She’s been kind of busy with that.”
“Busy?” says Lindsay.
“Preoccupied.”
“That’s too bad,” Lindsay says.
THE NEXT DAY Ben calls to ask if Lindsay can have lunch in the city. Sure, sure she can. No one comes into the city to talk about a house upstate. She dresses up, puts on makeup, wears hot underwear. Just in case. There is no just in case.
It’s on.
Driving into the city, Lindsay thinks she should feel guilty about sleeping with a married man with a pregnant wife. Not that she’s slept with him yet. She means in theory. But thinking you should feel guilty isn’t the same as feeling guilty. Lindsay tries, but she can’t.
They meet in a hotel restaurant on the far West Side. Dark. The kind of place where nobody Ben knows would ever have lunch.
She orders a burger. They split two bottles of wine and don’t finish their food. He talks about his musical. She tells him she read the awesome reviews. He says she’ll have to come see it. He’ll get her a ticket. Tickets?
“One ticket’s good for now.” She smiles. That settles it. The waiter sees Ben’s hands shake as he signs the credit card receipt. The waiter’s seen lots of shaking hands. That’s the kind of place this is.
Lindsay and Ben make out in the elevator, and her hands are all over him as he finds his key card. He pushes her lightly onto the bed, pulls down her sexy underwear.
“Wow,” he says. He enters her from behind. He holds the back of her neck, not hard enough to hurt her at all, but so she knows he’s in charge. He’s better than she expected. This could be not just financially and professionally helpful. It could be fun.
The room faces a courtyard. They lie there in the dim light from the window. Ben asks if she has to be back home soon. She has no plans. He doesn’t either. They don’t have a lot to say, but it doesn’t matter.
When Ben goes to take a shower, Lindsay checks his laptop. He’s visited the Hideaway Home listing many times. He’s also been watching old horror films in which houses drip blood and the walls heave with spirits. He’s watched The Shining twice. If Lindsay were his wife, she’d think a million times before she moved to the country with a guy who’s been doing that.
She closes the laptop before he returns to bed where they lie, pressed close. Neither makes a move to get up. After a while Lindsay grabs the remote and flips through the cable channels on the TV till she finds TCM.
Luck is on her side.
It’s The Masque of the Red Death.
They watch a man in a gorilla suit climb a chandelier made of burning candles and catch fire as the gorilla and the guests scream and Vincent Price cackles hysterically.
“I miss this,” says Ben.
“Huh?”
“Lying in bed watching movies. Emma and I used to do it all the time, but now she’s so tired from being pregnant, she just drops off to sleep, and I’m left all alone.”
That’s the first time he’s said her name. Emma. Until then it was my wife.
His wife is pregnant with his kid, and he’s blaming the wife for being sleepy. He deserves what he gets.
“Poor baby,” says Lindsay. “You poor thing.”
This is going to be easy.
BY THE TIME Ben brings Emma to see the house, he and Lindsay have spent three long afternoons in bed at the hotel. They never talk about what they’re doing. Ben prefers that, obviously. And what would Lindsay say?
On the third afternoon he says he’s worried that Emma won’t like the house. It needs so much work, and she’s pregnant and… He’s silent for a long time. Then he says, “Has it ever happened that someone installed a stove before they know they’re going to buy the house, before they’ve even made an offer?”
How would Lindsay know? But what she says is, “Just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it can’t. As long as it’s legal, and you can pay for it… and we’re all consenting adults.”
The main thing Lindsay needs to do is make him think he’s the director. He’s said to her, a few times, that he’s always wanted to direct. But really, it’s Lindsay who is the director. Every actress secretly wants to direct, right? And she’s got her own play in mind. A cross between performance art, Macbeth, Real Housewives, and Candid Camera. Lindsay watches a lot of TV, reality shows and dramas, and her ultimate dream is to star in a series that gets renewed forever, like ER, until the stars age out. She’d be happy with her own reality TV series, but what would it be called? Million Dollar Listing Sullivan County?
BEN AND LINDSAY are in bed when they agree that it would be simpler to pretend they’ve never met, and that Ben is seeing the house for the first time.
They say it simultaneously.
Ben says, “We’re reading each other’s minds.”
Lindsay smiles. She doesn’t want Ben reading hers.
This is just what she’s hoped for. It’s like an amazing real-life, break-the-fourth-wall audition, a chance to show a Broadway producer what a good actress she is. She’s talented, she knows she is. She’s a trained actress. Another first-rate actress with a run of third-rate luck.
He says, “About Emma and the house… I’m trying to keep things simple.”
“Sure,” Lindsay says. They’re way beyond simple already.
“It’ll be fun,” she tells Ben. “Harmless fun. Sort of like experimental theater. A cross between an immersive performance, like Sleep No More, and reality TV without an audience. House Hunters meets Real Housewives meets—”
“Okay,” says Ben. “Okay.”
TO COMPLICATE THINGS just a little—and mostly for the optics—Lindsay decides she needs a mom for her mom-and-pop real estate firm, and, with a minimal loan from Ben, though she doesn’t tell him what it’s for, she hires Sally, a friend of Lindsay’s dead mom. Sally’s always wanted to be onstage. Every year she sings—badly—at the community talent show.
Now she’ll do what Lindsay says if Lindsay tells her it’s her big break. She’ll play Lindsay’s mother. Ted’s wife. A part-time—maybe one-time—job, for when the couple from New York come to the office to talk about the house. The husband’s a Broadway producer. Does Sally understand what that might mean for their little town? How about… summer theater?
LINDSAY MAKES BEN describe Emma:
Pretty. A little faded. Tired. Eager to please.
Not knowing more about the wife—there isn’t much more she can ask—Lindsay takes a little risk and pays Heather, a girl she knows from town, thirty dollars to stand with her baby in the field and then duck down so the wife thinks she’s disappeared, or that she hasn’t really seen her. Lindsay knows it’s counterintuitive. For her plans to work, the wife needs to be reassured not spooked. But Lindsay senses, judging from a few things Ben has said, that the wife is more likely to agree to something if she’s a little scared. She’s the kind who has to prove things. Lindsay could almost feel sorry for her if she could tap into the feeling of pity. The fact that Ben said “google me” is one of the things that keeps her from feeling sorry for the wife. What kind of woman is stupid enough to marry a guy who’d say something like that?
The wife is more or less exactly as Lindsay imagined. So Lindsay has the advantage. Emma hasn’t been able to picture Lindsay. As far as she knows, neither she nor Ben has ever seen Lindsay before.
Emma has no idea what’s coming for her. When she thinks about the future, she sees herself, Ben, and the baby. She is unprepared. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s a law of nature. Survival of the fittest. You have a nice person with no plans and you put that person up against a not-very-nice person with a lot of plans. Who’s going to win?
Lindsay has hardly existed for Emma until Lindsay slithers out of her Prius in front of the house. The husband has spoken to Lindsay on the phone. That’s all she knows.
Lindsay has told Ben to tell Emma that she sounds like a fourteen-year-old. Like a Valley Girl. Like an idiot. She encouraged Ben to say mean things about her, to tell Emma she isn’t very bright.
Maybe he should have been an actor instead of a producer, though Lindsay guesses the money is in producing. If she didn’t know, she wouldn’t suspect that Ben had ever met her or saw the house before Emma did.
He said everything he’d said the first time he saw it—and more. Wow the staircase, wow the rooms, double wow the theater! He couldn’t believe how amazing! He’d never seen anything like it! He was blown away. If Lindsay didn’t know, she certainly wouldn’t suspect that he’d fucked her.
Oh, and he’d had the vintage stove installed, which at first Lindsay thought was excessive. But he must know his wife. Lindsay didn’t discourage him. She sees it as another step toward his being okay with gaslighting a pregnant wife. Because the stove was his idea.
It worked. When Emma saw that stove, Ben told Lindsay, the approval rating in Emma’s head flipped from a big maybe to a definite yes.
Lindsay plays super-solicitous. She’s so glad that Emma and Ben are wearing sneakers. She’d hate for them to step in raccoon poo or on a rusty nail. She’s super up front and honest. But she throws in a scary personal thrill for Ben, mentioning The Shining, which they watched in bed.
Ben doesn’t flinch. Good for him. Once again, he’s better than Lindsay expected.
Emma’s going to go for the house. Lindsay can tell right away. Emma probably would have agreed even if Ben hadn’t gone to all that trouble about the stove.
Lindsay wonders if Emma is going to ask her about Heather, the mystery girl in the field, and sure enough she does.
Lindsay says she has no idea who it could have been. The sun and shadow do strange things as they move over the fields. Sometimes the air seemed to shimmer and… you see things that aren’t there. No, there aren’t neighbors nearby. She doesn’t know who it could be. What Emma could have seen. She must have had a little tiny… hallucination. No, the girl couldn’t have walked here.
“One day,” Lindsay says, “I thought I saw a billion frogs hopping on the road? I got out and stopped. And guess what?”
“What?” says Ben.
“There were no frogs on the road.”
Adding that part about the frogs is exceptional. Awesome. Lindsay wants to high-five herself, she’s so good at this. But she can’t look at Ben. She doesn’t want him to see how easily she lies to his wife. She thinks it might make him like her less. But she’s wrong. He likes the frog thing, and he likes the other great thing she does, pretending to think the Madonna, the Virgin Mary, is the same as Madonna the singer. Playing dumb when she isn’t makes him like her more, as she discovers the next time they meet at the hotel.
Lindsay wants Emma’s life, or at least to have it offered to her, and then get to decide if she wants it or not. The husband, the baby, the house, the works. She’ll find a way to bring in Beth. Lindsay likes the challenge. Meanwhile she’s having fun.
AT THE REAL estate office Sally gets with the plan, and Ted just plays Ted. Lindsay’s sweet old dad, asking Ben about the mileage on his Volvo. Ted wants Lindsay to make a sale. He thinks that selling the house will make her feel better about working for him. He has no idea. He thinks it’s cute and just like his daughter when Lindsay says it would be good for business if Sally pretends to be his wife. The truth is, he’s always liked Sally. He likes having her around. When all the fun stuff starts, with Sally pretending to be Lindsay’s stepmom, Ted’s happy to play along. It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened since Lindsay’s mother died.
For now, the only problem is a big one: the mega-renovations. Lindsay wants this to happen so much that she suggests JD, whom she mostly avoids. The fact that he’s her half brother isn’t necessary information. They might think she’s throwing him a job, but the truth is she can’t stand him.
By the time Emma is deciding, and Ben’s pretending to decide on the house, any local builder capable of changing a light bulb is booked for the summer. The gossip is that JD had a huge job lined up, and the homeowners stiffed him and—surprise!—opted for Malibu instead of Sullivan County.
JD used to be a good guy, then something happened. No one knows what. He turned. He stole a few bucks from Ted and tried to steal from Lindsay, but she caught him rooting around in her backpack. He wasn’t on drugs. It was something else. Ted even took him to a therapist who said that petty thievery was a cry for help. What did JD have to cry about? He certainly wasn’t telling.
JD learned to hammer in a nail before he learned to snap two Lego pieces together. He’s good at what he does. He’s the best. It doesn’t hurt that he looks like the hot contractor from central casting, and that he grew up with all the guys—the best plumbers, electricians, chimney cleaners—he needs to be able to call.
Lindsay calls and says, “I have a job for you. Young couple. New York. She’s pregnant. Buying a big house. They’re loaded.”
He’s surprised to hear from her.
“Where’s the house?”
“Hideaway Home,” Lindsay says.
There’s a silence. A long silence.
Everyone knows that something happened to JD in that house. Junior year of high school, he’d gone in there on a dare. He and his friends got crazy drunk one night and made some kind of bet. The loser had to go into the house.
JD lost the bet. This was when the three crazy hermits still lived there.
He stayed for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. His friends began to get nervous.
They were relieved when he burst through the front door. But they shouldn’t have been.
Something happened. He saw something. Someone did something. He was never the same.
Lindsay has no idea if he’ll agree to work on the house.
Finally, he says, “Let’s do it.”
“A couple of things,” says Lindsay. “You need to keep your mouth shut.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“Like what?”
“Well, okay… I have a fake stepmom. Sally. She’s pretending to be my stepmother.”
“Why?”
“Good question. I’m not sure.” The fact is, Lindsay isn’t sure why she wants Sally involved. It might be a mistake. But she likes the power it gives her. If she preps Sally and gives her notes, Sally won’t ask too many questions. And Ted seems to like it.
“Because,” she tells JD. “Because I say so.
“Got it,” says JD.
AFTER BEN AND Emma close on Hideaway Home, Lindsay goes back to having no clients. She has a lot of time on her hands, and so, it seems, does Ben, who can always find time to meet Lindsay at their favorite hotel. First they fuck, then they watch an old horror film. A weird romance, but what romance isn’t? And besides, Lindsay doesn’t believe in romance. She definitely isn’t in this for the romance, which is why she sees no point in telling Beth about any of it. For now.
Meanwhile, she and Beth are having a good time writing the phony journal. Beth works for the historical society, so she knows a lot about the area, and she likes using that knowledge to (she thinks) get closer to Lindsay. When Lindsay has the brilliant idea of writing the fake diary for Emma to find, she doesn’t have to invent much. It’s a memoir, more or less. The sad story of Lindsay’s failed acting career, of all the people who promised to help her, of everyone who disappointed her. Lindsay and Beth just have to change a few key details, backdate it, and do some research about Broadway hits to make the timeline work. My Fair Lady is perfect!
Beth doesn’t know how the book is going to be used. No one but Lindsay knows. Beth thinks it’s a fun project that she and Lindsay are doing together. She thinks they’re having fun. Kind of like a short novel about a woman who lived in Hideaway Home. Maybe it will be a real book someday, maybe some kind of art piece.
Beth helps Lindsay make up the story that Lindsay writes in the notebook in that beautiful peacock-blue ink that you can’t find online but can only get in one particular old-school general store in Ellenville. Lindsay remembers the ink from high school. The cool girl who wrote with it later went to an Ivy League college. Lindsay thinks that girl’s luck might rub off on her if she uses the same ink.
Like Lindsay, the girl in the made-up journal was dying to act on Broadway. Maybe you could say she did better than Lindsay. At least she got to be in the chorus. And in another way she did worse, getting scammed by the lecherous Broadway pervert. Lindsay has known a few of those, but she was smarter than the journal girl, who let herself get pregnant and shipped off to have the baby in a loony bin upstate.
Lindsay has told Beth that she can never have children. And Beth has never said she wants kids. She is probably afraid to spoil their good thing by bringing it up.
Lindsay liked pretending to be someone whose life was worse than hers. It made her feel better about herself.
Now that she’s gotten the lead in Ben’s musical, she has it all over that imaginary girl, with her baby on the way, dealing with the creepy doctor and his wife conspiring to steal the baby. Sometimes Lindsay had to remind herself that the girl in the journal isn’t real, that she and Beth invented her.
LINDSAY THINKS THAT Ben’s a jerk for letting Emma do all the work, for having sex with Lindsay in the city while Emma makes all the decisions that go into a renovation. It’s not Lindsay’s problem, but it does confirm her view that people like Emma get what they deserve if they don’t stand up for themselves.
When Lindsay and Beth finish the journal, Lindsay puts it on top of a box of crap salvaged from the historical society. She tells Beth: The book is all about Hideaway Home, and that’s where it belongs. It’s like putting a fallen baby bird back in its nest.
“The mother bird doesn’t always take it back,” says Beth.
“Don’t be dark,” says Lindsay.
Beth takes it to the house and asks JD to store it in the attic. They tell him not to mention it, which makes him suspicious, but he’s grateful to Lindsay for getting him work. It’s no skin off his nose to add a box of junk to the garbage already up there in the attic. Emma won’t notice or care. And Lindsay has made him promise to keep his mouth shut.
JD has been pretty good so far. There was only that one night when he crashed the little dinner party Lindsay gave to show Ben how cool she was and that she was so in control, she could make him come to her house and act like he hardly knew her.
Lindsay would like everyone to forget that JD is her half brother, and not ask about Sally, who, Lindsay realizes, she can’t get rid of now without someone wondering what happened. JD almost blew everything when he claimed he’d dreamed about a blond girl and her baby in the field. He must have seen Heather poking around the house when Lindsay paid her and drove her there and hid down the road while Heather stood where Emma could see her from a window.
It was theater. It was fun. Maybe no one else would understand why Lindsay enjoyed it.
After JD plants the notebook in the attic, Emma finds it, just as Lindsay knew she would. Ben knows nothing about it. There’s no need for him to know.
Plans work best when no one person—except Lindsay—knows everything.
After a while Lindsay tells JD that Beth needs the book back at the historical society, that a local donor noticed it missing. She and Beth were just being sentimental, thinking that a book about Hideaway Home belongs in Hideaway Home. The whole thing seems unlikely, totally ridiculous. But JD goes for it. Anyway, he decides not to object or ask too many questions. It’s not worth a scene with Lindsay to refuse to do her a little favor.
If Emma happens to ask JD if he’s seen the notebook, Lindsay counts on him not telling her that he’s been adding and removing stuff from the mess in the attic. He probably doesn’t think it’s important, and it isn’t, though Lindsay likes the idea of Emma reading the book and getting scared of something that supposedly happened at Hideaway Home. What would be creepier for a pregnant woman than knowing about another pregnant woman who was in danger—here, in her house?
Lindsay likes taking little sections from the journal and running with them. For example, the part about the pregnant actress eating all those oranges.
One afternoon, when Ben happened to tell Lindsay that Emma was on her way back from the city, Lindsay went to the house, left the door open, and left a bunch of orange peels on the front porch.
A little something extra.
Beth is okay with how the story in the journal breaks off in the middle. She’s a fan of cliffhangers.
AFTER THEY HAVE sex, Lindsay and Ben take turns picking the films they watch.
One day, Lindsay asks Ben, “Have you ever seen Gaslight?”
“Not since I was a kid,” says Ben.
“Let’s watch it,” says Lindsay.
“Sure,” says Ben. “Why not?”
Does he suspect what Lindsay is doing? Probably not. He’s not smart enough.
Lindsay monitors Ben’s response as wicked Charles Boyer convinces his new bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she is going crazy. Years before, he murdered her aunt, but couldn’t find the jewels he killed her for. When the newlywed couple move into the dead aunt’s town house, objects start to disappear. A picture vanishes from the wall. Footsteps echo from the empty attic, the lights brighten and dim. Until, at the last moment, the hysterical wife, who now believes she’s insane, is saved by a friendly police inspector before the evil husband can have her committed and get the house and the dead aunt’s jewels.
Ben’s gone silent—and tense. Lindsay can’t read him, which she doesn’t like.
Lindsay says, “The one thing I didn’t think was so great was that the husband did it for the money. Bor-ring. So many things are more important than money…”
“Why else would he do it?” asks Ben.
“For the challenge.” Lindsay reaches over and lightly rests a hand on Ben’s thigh. “For the fun.”