Chapter 31

Ariel

When the phone rang, I was in the midst of making table centerpieces for the neighborhood Fourth of July party out of red, white, and blue colored sand. There were granules all over my counters and floors, and so far the centerpieces didn’t look a thing like the pictures. “Why did I say I could do this?” I wondered aloud to no one.

I reached for the phone, expecting it to be Kristy. We had been playing phone tag the last three days. The voice on the other end was female, but it wasn’t Kristy. “Is this Ariel Baxter?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, walking over to clean up the sand from the counters and find a safe place to store the glass centerpieces.

“Hi, Ariel, this is Betsy Dean. Tom’s wife?” She sounded as if she’d been crying. “I met you briefly at the pool, and I was …” She paused. “I was—well, it sounds silly to say since we don’t know each other—but I was at your birthday party. At the Millers’?”

“Yes, of course, Betsy,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get together with you!”

“Me, too,” she said, but her voice did not carry the polite enthusiasm of mine.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.

“Well, actually I had a question. You’re friends with Justine, right?”

“Well, friends is a strong word, Betsy,” I said, thinking of the last conversation I had with Justine, the way she’d looked at me before she left.

“Did you go to the beach with her for the weekend recently?”

“Yes,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest so loudly I wondered if she could hear it. I did not like where this was headed. She was asking me about something I wasn’t supposed to talk about.

“Well, I just wondered if anything strange happened while you were there.”

“Strange?” I asked. Where would I begin?

“Yes. With Justine.”

“Umm, no?” I lied.

“Can you hang on a minute?” she asked.

“Sure.” I listened as she covered up the phone and spoke, her voice muffled by her hand. Was Tom in the background? Her children? My heart beat wildly, and I wondered where this was leading. Stupid weekend. What had she heard? I wished for the hundredth time I hadn’t gone. I felt like I had wandered into a trap.

“Ariel?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m here.” I sat motionless.

“Are you aware of Justine’s relationship with my husband?” she asked.

“Umm, sort of? Just that they dated in high school.” I felt a throbbing behind my eyes. Where was she going with this?

“Ariel,” she said, “when you were out of town with Justine, Tom was out of town too. He said it was business. I had no idea that she was gone the same time or that there was anything to worry about. At the time I was still going on the assumption that we were going to make the best of the fact that Tom and I had become neighbors with his long lost love, and to figure out how to live with this … coincidence. I thought we could all be adult about it, what with Justine’s happy marriage, not to mention my own.”

I thought of how progressive it had all seemed.

“I think that Tom was in Myrtle Beach when you were.” I heard the voice in the background again. “Okay, I guess I need to be completely honest. I know Tom was in Myrtle Beach when you were.”

Like a movie reel in my head I saw Justine on the balcony talking on the phone with her back to me, taking forever to get ready the night we went out, standing in front of me at the club saying she was leaving, then disappearing into the crowd. I heard the creak of her bedsprings as she crawled in at the break of dawn. I closed my eyes to erase the images from my mind, but they wouldn’t budge. In my head I knew that Betsy’s phone call explained a lot, but in my heart I wanted another explanation to be true. “How do you know something’s going on?” I asked, stalling. “Maybe this is all just a coincidence.”

“There’s lots of things. I know this sounds crazy, but I found something on our computer,” she said. “He downloaded a Barry Manilow song. Barry Manilow, Ariel. Would your husband download a Barry Manilow song of his own volition?”

I thought of our ride home, the Barry Manilow song she had tortured me with, and my blood ran cold.

“Wouldn’t you want the truth? I mean, if you were in my shoes?” she went on. “I’m speaking to you from one wife to another. A wife who knows something’s going on and just needs some help to prove it. The knowing but not knowing is driving me crazy.”

I thought about the man next to me in the restaurant that night I had gone to dinner alone. The man who called his lover and then his wife. The two voices—two personalities—he used when he spoke to them. “Yes,” I said, my voice weak, “I would want to know. But something’s telling me knowing for sure isn’t going to make you feel better.”

“I just want the truth.” She sighed. “I hope you have told me the truth.”

My stomach sank to my feet, and I rested my forehead in my hand. I thought of Justine’s face when she asked me not to say anything about the weekend. Surely she hadn’t seen Tom. Surely there was another explanation for what was going on. She was going through a hard time. She had blown off steam. But was she committing adultery with our neighbor? Could the Justine I knew do that? It was unthinkable. There had to be an explanation beyond what Betsy was suggesting. Besides, I didn’t even know this woman. She could be crazy, always accusing Tom’s neighbors of being in love with him wherever they moved. I had to get more information before I ratted out my friend to a virtual stranger. “Yes,” I said. “I have.” Was I lying? “But if I find out anything that I think would be helpful to you, I will let you know,” I offered, an olive branch to make up for the lie. She thanked me, and we hung up.

I immediately made another call.

Justine answered the phone just before voice mail picked up, as though she started to avoid me, then thought better of it. “I just got a phone call from Betsy Dean,” I said.

“And?” Justine asked, her voice perky as ever. But I had learned something about Justine. The perkier her words, the less she meant them.

“She wanted to know what happened that weekend,” I said.

“And what did you tell her?” I heard no panic in Justine’s voice. I tried to take that as a good sign.

“That nothing happened, nothing out of the ordinary,” I said dutifully, hoping my loyalty would bridge the gap that had opened up between us.

“Well, you know nothing happened so of course that’s what you told her,” she said.

“She said that Tom was there. In Myrtle Beach. Did you know that?”

She laughed. “Now how would I know Tom was there?”

“Well, I mean, he’s helping you get a job and I thought maybe—”

“Maybe he went dancing at the same salsa club as us?” She laughed again. “You were there. Did you see him?”

“No, but—”

“But what? Oh, that’s right. You weren’t in the club the whole time, now were you?”

“Justine, I explained that.” Heat rose up my neck, reddening my face. Yet I had nothing to be ashamed of.

“I know. And I accept your explanation. But you must admit it could look bad if someone got the wrong idea. Which is what’s happening here. Listen, Betsy’s a nice woman. You know I’ve tried to be her friend, and I genuinely like her. But this whole story sounds a bit paranoid, don’t you think?”

I got up from the couch, allowing Justine’s words to free me and fill me with hope like air in my lungs. “Yes, it was strange. I mean, how did she pick me to call? And how did she know about our weekend away?”

“This neighborhood’s full of talk. That’s what happens when gossipy types get involved. Always trying to stir up trouble where there isn’t any. Look, I am sorry you got pulled into this. I really am.” She paused, sighed. “Plus, she’s neighbors with Erica, and I’ve heard they’ve gotten pretty chummy. Erica has been known, as I’ve said, to get in the middle of neighborhood drama. To stir the pot. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was behind Betsy’s paranoia.”

“Well, I’m glad you told me the truth.” It was more a question than a statement.

Justine paused. I heard her breathe in and out. “Of course,” she said. “We’re friends, right? Friends tell each other everything.” She hung up before I could affirm that we were friends or comment on how much that meant to me. And yet, something in me still felt uneasy.

I drank a glass of water before scrolling on my caller ID to Betsy’s number. She answered as soon as the phone rang, her voice breathy.

“Betsy?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She spoke in a low voice. “Ariel?” she asked. I pictured her the night of my party, laughing and talking to neighbors I didn’t know as Tom raised his glass to her.

“I just wanted you to know I talked to Justine and she assured me that she had no idea Tom was in Myrtle Beach. I just wanted to offer that as reassurance after our last conversation. I thought—you know—that you would want to know that.”

She sighed. “Ariel, do you actually think she’d admit it to you if she did?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding my head even though she couldn’t see me.

She started whispering. “Listen, I can’t talk right now. Tom’s home. But I want you to know that I am going to try to believe both you and Justine. Just know that it’s a bit hard. A wife just has an instinct about things like this,” she said.

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you?” she asked.

I started to answer but realized she was already gone.