Graham’s snoring sounds like the ferry’s horn as it leaves the Wall Street station on those days after work when Graham and I would take a spontaneous trip to our favorite restaurant in Vinegar Hill. On the way back, we’d walk the Brooklyn Bridge with mini bottles of champagne for dessert. It always felt like the most New York thing: to take a boat to another borough because we liked the pork chops. We only did it a handful of times, but it never got less exciting. It was a rare moment when I could forget the five-year plan and just be.
I try to ride the wave of that feeling now, lying in bed next to Graham, in a room so dark you’d think there was no moon outside. So dark your pupils could take over your entire iris and still find nothing to lock onto. But the feeling fades as quickly as the memory until I feel stuck again, my eyes bloodshot, my throat hot and stinging with acidic bile, my teeth brushed so many times my gums are raw.
If Graham was with someone who actually slept, he would have gone to a somnologist at this point; she would have put him on a CPAP machine to shut him the fuck up. But I found the snores comforting, a kind of white noise in the background of my night; and a surefire way to know if he was awake and I was about to get caught.
By the end of the cocktail party, Graham was mildly drunk but hid it well. Probably because Reed kept such a close eye on him, guiding him away from risky conversations, not letting him kiss me for that long, following him around with a constantly refilled glass of ice water. Graham’s drunkenness made Reed vulnerable. Too many boyhood secrets ready to be revealed at any moment—all it takes is one too many Jack and Cokes. It was fascinating to watch.
I roll out of bed without trying too hard to stay quiet and rummage through the dresser drawers until I find the sports bra and leggings I snuck into my suitcase. Graham had insisted while I was packing that I wouldn’t need or want to work out during our wedding weekend; “There won’t be time, and plus, you already look amazing, that won’t change.” He put his arms around my waist and his hands paused on my belly and he said something about how I’m basically nonexistent I’ve gotten so thin, and normally that would be a compliment but for some reason in that moment, as I was packing to marry him, the thought of being nonexistent was alarming. Because that was how I felt. Like the wedding had taken over and I didn’t fucking exist anymore. I was no longer Eliza. And I had left Elizabeth far behind.
So I stuffed four days’ worth of workout clothes into my bag like I was smuggling drugs into Vermont straight from Colombia.
I put on the sports bra and from the hole in the side, where those useless cups normally sit deformed and annoying, I pull out the folded piece of paper. MISSING: BERNADETTE WARD with her shining eyes smiling at me like nothing was wrong. That girl had no clue what was coming to her, the devastation and torture she was about to endure. That girl was still alive. Her life had yet to be defined solely by her death. Or disappearance.
I fold the paper up again, this time smaller and more gingerly, and put it back in my bra. For some reason I don’t want to leave her in that room alone. I don’t want him to find it.
The hallway is speckled with night-lights, lining the wood paneling every couple of feet like an airplane aisle during an emergency evacuation. This way. This way, please. You’re going the right direction. As if when you’re cascading to your death at five hundred miles an hour, you’ll be thinking, Thank God my demise will be well lit.
The gym is in the furnished basement, in a room next to the pool table, a second bar, and a guest bedroom bigger than my first apartment. It’s covered in floor-to-ceiling mirrors and one large window at just the right height that you can look out into the darkness of the backyard while on the treadmill. You can stare at the mountains during the day, but I’m never here during the day.
The delicate hum of the treadmill is like white noise to me. I always need sounds now. Maybe it’s from living in Manhattan for a few years, or from having lived in silence for so many before that. But if it’s too quiet, if things are so still the loudest sound is the ringing in my own ears, I start to feel suffocated. I start to see things and hear things. I start to have daydreams about people coming in the night, breaking into the house and killing all of us. I do the math for how long it will take until our bodies are found. This weekend’s events are an exception, but normally it’s just the family here. It could be weeks before a neighbor knocks on the door. Would the smell of our bodies be the first thing she notices—our rotting flesh wafting into her face the second she comes inside? Or would she notice the cars—hmm, they haven’t moved in a while, that’s strange. Or maybe it would be longer than that. Months. My body would begin to decompose in that bed right next to Graham’s. Maybe we’d die spooning. Or naked. Blowflies and flesh flies and skin beetles crawling over my no-longer-tanned-and-toned body. Entering my mouth, biting at my eyes.
I hit the emergency stop button in the center of the treadmill’s console and nearly fall backwards when the machine abruptly stops. It keeps humming in my ears as I stand there, drenched in so much sweat I’d drizzled all over the thing’s base, and try to catch my breath. Four miles goes fast when you’re thinking about dead bodies. About Ruthie. About Bernadette.
I can feel the paper burning a hole in the pocket of my bra, pressing down on my chest, slowly suffocating me.
On the way back to our bedroom, I stop outside Reed and Veronica’s door. In the darkness, it would be easy for me to hide there, sidle up to the wood paneling until I felt like I was sinking into it, waiting. I think to that day in the apartment when Reed attempted to help me move. I think about him standing beside my suitcases, skeptical.
I think about Graham insisting he pick up Chinese food from the best place on the Upper East Side, leaving me alone in my nightmare. I retreated to the closet—“I have to find my pajamas”—and sat down on the floor. It was the first time I realized there was a rug in there. A rug in the closet. That’s the kind of rich I was moving into. The kind that buys a rug to make sure my feet are comfortable when I’m picking out a shirt.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reaching for my phone in my pocket, not to call anyone but to know that I could. I didn’t hear the closet doors opening until Reed spoke, but I didn’t stir. I opened my eyes slowly and looked directly at his fucking face. At this point very few things scared me, but he was on the list as one of them.
“Do I know you?” he asked, his head cocked like a puppy confused about why his supposed treat tasted like medicine.
“What?” I said, trying to muster the attitude of a pleasant but slightly ditzy girlfriend. That’s what he needed me to be. Since I’m prettier than his wife, he needs to think I’m at least equally as stupid.
“You just seem so familiar.” He was staring at my face like he was calculating it, running my nose and eyes through the Rolodex in his head—probably of women he’d fucked. The multitudes this man went through only to be domesticated by Veronica because his mother told him to be. The only true way to remedy someone’s fuckboy reputation is to get him husbanded and fathered as soon as possible.
“Maybe in pictures from Graham?” I offered, knowing that wasn’t remotely convincing.
“No, that’s not it. It’s not your face. Just your...vibe.”
He said it like a Mormon expat living in Hawaii who just discovered surfing, coconut milk, and premarital sex. “My vibe?”
“Just something about you...” he said. I reminded myself to smile, to loosen my shoulders, to laugh it off. He doesn’t know me, I told myself. He knows nothing about me. “I definitely recognize you from somewhere.”
I lean my ear against the hard wooden door of Reed and Veronica’s room, listening for any motion inside. Were they trying for Baby Number Two? Then I look down at the Apple Watch draped onto my wrist. 4:18. They wouldn’t be awake or moving. Only I’m up at this hour.
The truth is he does know me from somewhere. He hasn’t been able to figure it out since that day in the closet, but I live in constant fear that he’ll wake up one morning and it will pop into his memory with the same clarity of what he ate for dinner the night before. I hate that he has something over me but he’s too stupid to know it. I hate that I’m here and that he’s here. I hate that he has a wife and a kid. I hate that there’s not much stopping me from bursting through the door, plucking Veronica’s stiletto off the cold floor, and jabbing it into his neck.
Instead, I pull the missing poster out of my bra. I unfold it, carefully. I run it back and forth over the door frame’s trim to get out the creases.
I look at Bernadette one more time. Her eyes. Her mouth. The way some hair falls whimsically around her temples. Is this how she’d want to be remembered? Or was this just the photo her parents decided to use?
I wonder what photo Graham would use if I went missing—the one of us together at the firepit? Or our engagement photo from Carl Schurz Park? But then I realize I wouldn’t get missing posters or a search party of friends and family calling my name in a line through the woods. With his family’s reach, I’d get the FBI. My face would be plastered on every TV station from here to Thailand. They’d find me if they wanted to. If I wanted to be found.
I slip the poster under the door frame so Bernadette’s face can greet him in the morning the same way it’s been haunting me.