We were summoned for dinner exactly as Lorraine planned at a prompt 7:15 p.m. when a buzzer went off inside our bedroom and Lorraine’s voice materialized over the intercom. “Dinner is ready,” was all she said, like a fork in fucking Beauty and the Beast.
Fucking Lorraine.
I had spent the last hour and a half unpacking and thinking about her. I hung up my dress and Graham’s suit and wondered why she had looked at me for so long in the driveway. I laid out my makeup and toiletries in our bathroom while replaying her greeting—it’s nice to see you—and studying my memory of her face.
Then I started self-soothing. She was looking at me normally. I was imagining it all. There was no weird pause or unwanted lingering. She greeted me the same way I greeted Lady Gaga when I met her at a fundraiser. It doesn’t mean I’d ever met Lady Gaga before.
I imagined the moment. I imagined all those moments. I didn’t know this woman. And this woman does not know me. She’s simply come out of what is surely a luscious retirement to be there for her little boy Graham on his big day. It was nothing more than meeting her favorite kid’s fiancée for the first time. The woman he was about to promise to spend the rest of his life with. It was as simple as that. I couldn’t think about the other possibility, because that would mean Lorraine could ruin everything.
“You ready?” Graham asks at the door.
I roll out of bed and slip into the white minidress and heels waiting for me and take Graham’s hand.
We walk slowly down the hallway from the north wing of the house—consisting of our suite and Reed and Veronica’s suite—to the south wing, where the common spaces, offices, and Oskar’s lodging are spread out over eleven thousand pristine square feet. Getting anywhere in this house involves at least five minutes and several walks down dimly lit hallways. At home, Graham leaves all the lights on all the time. It is by far his most annoying domestic trait, and I’m talking about a guy who buys his underwear from a boutique in London. But here, it’s like his parents hide the light switches to force you to walk around in the dark, feeling for walls, desperate for a way out, trying to sense if someone is there watching you.
I tug on Graham’s hand a little tighter and push that claustrophobic feeling away. The one I always get in the dark that always gets worse when I’m here. The feeling like I’m going to be swallowed whole into the night.
“You’re late,” is the first thing Mr. Walker says to us—well, to Graham—when we enter the dining room. He is not a man who has time for pleasantries, so his greetings are usually insults or instructions.
Graham fears his father more than I fear his mother. Though maybe fear isn’t the right word. I’m not afraid of her. I’m afraid she can see under my carefully crafted costume. I could distract Graham with my body, and Mr. Walker and Reed with fantasies of my body, and Veronica with the fake closeness she thinks we have, but Mrs. Walker has the power to see right through me. If anyone was going to figure out I was a fraud, it would be her. And she’d kick me out of this family faster than Graham could say but Mom, I love her...
Graham’s fear of his father is forged from lack of affirmation. Mr. Walker knows all he needs to do is tell Graham that he did a good job. But Graham will never get it. That would mean Mr. Walker acknowledging that someone he raised might have turned out better. Graham is better looking. Graham is more successful. Graham is marrying someone hotter. Graham has it all. So Mr. Walker holds all Graham’s flaws over his head, letting them drop in the most convenient moments.
“You told us 7:15,” Graham says, releasing my hand to look down at his watch, an early wedding present I gave him last week. Everyone but Graham recognizes the irony in that—me getting him a two-thousand-dollar watch with his own money and calling it a “gift”—but he loves it. “It’s 7:16. Give me a break.”
Mr. Walker approaches me slowly, looking me up and down with an approving smile that sends some vomit up my throat behind my oh-so-lovely grin. I love being objectified by my sixty-five-year-old father-in-law. It’s not only like he’s taking my clothes off with his eyes, but also snapping a picture of my naked body so that he can think about it the next time he’s having sex with Cheryl.
I know I look the part. Lena and I spent two months finding white outfits appropriate for all the evenings leading up to the aisle. A strappy minidress for the family dinner. A white jumpsuit for the cocktail party. A lace white calf-length dress for the rehearsal dinner. A silky white pajama set. A white wool coat and white shawl and a furry white option if I don’t like the shawl. If I weren’t going straight to hell, I’d have enough clothes for every possible event in heaven.
For this tradition-obsessed old-school family, our courtship happened fast and our engagement even faster. Anything I could do to paint myself as the picture of a perfect bride, I would do, until they were obedient dogs in my Pavlovian experiment. Eliza. Bride. Eliza. Bride. Eliza. Bride.
“You look beautiful,” Mr. Walker says, taking my hands and giving me a kiss on both cheeks like he was the Prince of Wales and I should be honored to be in his company. It’s not entirely far off.
The Walker family is an institution in this town, where the median income is four hundred thousand dollars but theirs is far greater. They aren’t the mayor or the owner of the local market chain or the purveyor of the ski-in-ski-out resort a few mountains over, no. But they know all those people. They’re great friends with the mayor and the governor and the vice presidential candidate who lives a half hour away. They have monthly dinners with the lieutenant governor. Douglas golfs with the attorney general and Cheryl organizes three fundraisers a year with the police commissioner’s wife. The chief justice of the Vermont state court is Graham’s godfather. The Walker family is an unbreakable, untouchable institution. And I’m about to join it.
“Thank you, Mr. Walker,” I say. “You look very handsome yourself.” I pretend to fix his tie, as if it was anything but perfectly straight already. I pause when I am supposed to, leaving him just enough of a gap to step in—please, call me Douglas, I’ve told you that. You’re family now. But it never comes. He likes the patriarchal power of it. He’s the head of this family. He gets what he wants. So I call him Doug in my head to spite him. Even though he’ll never know it.
Cheryl is on the other side of the room, standing at the bar and stabbing three olives with a toothpick before drowning them in her vodka martini. “You look lovely, dear,” her prickly voice says, though she has yet to look in my direction once. She’s wearing an off-white frock eerily similar to the jumpsuit I am planning to wear tomorrow. Of course the mother of the groom is wearing white. She always has trouble giving up the spotlight. Mine looks better, of course. Mine is lower cut to show just enough cleavage for Graham’s friends to be jealous, and just enough protruding rib for my friends to be jealous. Hers is a little, well, matronly. Like something on a mannequin at Neiman Marcus.
Graham pulls a chair out for me, and I lower into it, waiting for him to sit in the seat beside me before tucking myself a little farther under the table. All of these habits, from sitting down for dinner to choosing the fork to wiping my mouth properly, have been engraved into my brain by this point. But it only comes out when I’m here, when Graham sits up straighter and smiles less and eats even though his father’s disappointment makes him lose his appetite. It’s important for people like them to maintain these arbitrary traditions, like where your fork and knife go on your plate when you’re finished eating. It perpetuates the division between us and them. Between those with and those without.
“Where’s Reed?” Graham asks when the seats across from us remain empty, the prodigal son and his inane other half apparently even later than we are.
No one acknowledges Graham’s question. Instead, Cheryl takes a sip of her martini, and her lipstick tags the edge of her glass like she is marking her territory. Her makeup, as usual, is subtle but expensive and it’s caked slightly around the crow’s feet that peek through the Botox. You’d only notice if you were looking for it, and I always was. “How was your flight?” Cheryl asks, finally breaking the silence.
“Smooth and easy,” Graham says, unfolding his napkin and gently placing it on his lap as I do the same. “Nick says hello,” he adds, referring to our pilot this morning. He is the son of one of Doug’s coworkers. Doug is the one who got him the pilot gig after he graduated from his flight training program. Usually, jobs working with this prestigious level of clientele take years to climb up the ladder toward. But not for a friend of the Walkers.
“Travel days are always exhausting, I find. Even for such a short flight,” I add. I’d heard Veronica say that unironically once after flying from New Jersey to their place in Southampton and I never forgot it. There couldn’t be anything less stressful than a private jet. We could not have been less troubled. But rich people see everything as a personal inconvenience.
“I feel the same way,” Cheryl expounds, like I’d just articulated something she’d been unable to put into words all these years. “Why don’t I see if I can get Marta or Louis up here tomorrow for a little massage? Lorraine!”
Lorraine marches in from the kitchen, moving faster than a woman her age probably should, an apron twisted around her middle and a salad bowl in each hand. She places one down at Doug’s seat first, then Cheryl’s as she offers to call into town tomorrow and schedule something for the morning.
“We’re meeting the caterer in the morning,” I say to Lorraine without thinking. I didn’t say it aggressively or with the tone of an order like Graham and Doug would have—like she should already know our schedule—but I immediately analyze her pause, the way she stands beside Cheryl looking at me. Is it a look or a glare? Is it a glare or a moment of recognition?
I offer a smile, kind and apologetic. I’m just stressed. It’s just so fucking stressful to be a bride.
“I’d love for you to be there, but I understand if you’re too busy,” I say to Cheryl. “You’ve already done so much.”
“In the afternoon, then,” she corrects. She looks at me, placating and pitiful, like I need a massage now more than ever. “Of course I’ll be there.”
Most of this wedding is Graham’s mother’s fever dream—the kind of thing she would have chosen for herself if her mother-in-law weren’t so heavily involved in the same way she is now in mine. She picked a florist—the son of a former conservative congressman friend—and decided on chocolate cosmos in a bed of greenery. She found a caterer—the most sought out for their Southampton parties—and compiled a menu of filets and salmons. She tagged a bakery—the midlife crisis of the police chief’s wife—and chose the vanilla naked cake and apple cider doughnuts. And she had the final say on the venue: a plot of land she and Mr. Walker are gifting us to build our very own mountainous castle.
This is fine with me because I don’t give a shit. About any of it. My only three requests were a ceremony in Vermont in October, a dress of my choosing that I would pay for, and to have the New York Times Vows writer and photographer in attendance. She could have whatever band she wanted and invite whatever attorney general her black heart desired.
“Sorry we’re late,” Reed says, gliding into the room like he’s being pulled on one of those airport moving staircases. Separately, Graham is one of the hottest people I’ve ever laid my eyes on. However, I learned during my first visit here, when you put him in the same room as Reed—if they stand too close or get caught in a picture together—it suddenly looks like each of Graham’s features are just one centimeter off in some way. Separately, Graham’s head is the perfect size. Together, he looks like a bobblehead. Separately, his eyes are the most stunning blue I’ve ever seen. Together, they’re gray like dirty bathwater.
I hated that Veronica had that on me. That in our wedding photos, she’ll be married to the hotter Walker. What gets me through is knowing that Graham will have the hotter wife.
The 2008 sauv blanc is taunting me in the glass at my seat. It is making my head spin, I want it so badly. Here, in this house with these people, I can’t outwardly be on my wedding diet. I’m not about to eat a grilled cheese with French fries, but I have to eat what I am served. With my friends in New York, everyone knows you can say the words wellness or gluten free or intermittent fasting and it means you’re dieting in one of the many socially acceptable capacities. Here, food is the biggest topic of judgment. If they knew the diet I’m on, the amount of restricting and bingeing and puking I do daily, Veronica and Cheryl would look at me with their heads tilted, small smiles escaping their lined lips—How sad for you that to look like us you need to diet. But if I ate whatever I wanted, gave in to every salty or sweet craving my mouth watered for, then I’d get the Oh, you’re having another one? or Didn’t you just eat? or Are you sure you need that?
So I drink the wine. And, yes, Cheryl, I do fucking need it.
Veronica enters a few seconds behind Reed, always. An eighteenth-century tradition they don’t even realize they’re following. She’s tall and thin and is the kind of put together that probably made her look thirty-five when she was twenty-two, a trait that comes with family money. Sometimes when I look at her, I think about how in different circumstances—in a different life—we probably could be friends. She was the first family member I met. We got a bottle of rosé at Café Cluny when Graham and I first realized this was serious; that we were moving fast and on the same page about it. We sat at a table outside one cool spring afternoon, when the temperature was chilly but the sun was hot like summer on your face. Every few minutes I’d bring the glass to my lips and let the liquid sit there, cold and sweet, barely seeping through into my mouth. Then I’d put it down.
“Do you not like the wine?” she’d asked when her glass was empty and mine was still full. “We can get a different bottle.”
“I love it!” I said before she could call the waiter over. “This is my second glass!” I lied. “You’ve got to catch up.” She blushed as I refilled her.
Then refilled it again. And again.
When she was drunk enough—one bottle had turned into two and it might as well have been an IV straight to her head—she leaned in, wobbly and giggly, like a happy child. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “You really don’t.”
“Do what?” I asked, charmed by her drunkenness.
She was silent for a moment, but then her face turned serious, her eyes thinned and she was suddenly alert, like the booze had disappeared from her body with the breeze. “The Walkers are... They know everyone. They’re important. Once you know their secrets, you won’t ever be able to leave.”
Then she leaned back and hiccupped, giggling at the sound like what she had just said was already a memory she wouldn’t have tomorrow.
I knew the Walkers had secrets. So do I. That’s the point.
“Thanks for gracing us with your presence,” Graham says to the two of them as they sit across from us, their salads dressed and getting soggier each moment they aren’t eating them.
“Oh, chill out,” Reed says.
“Are you going to be late to the ceremony too?” Graham asks. “Make me stand up there by myself for a half hour?”
Graham likes being told to chill as much as a woman likes being told to calm down. There is something about that word that’s inherently offensive.
“You waited fifteen minutes. You survived.”
“I don’t—” Graham keeps glancing at Doug, waiting for him to be as ticked with Reed as he was with us. If Doug is paying attention, he doesn’t show it.
“That’s enough. Just eat,” Cheryl commands, shaking her head. She looks between Veronica and me, like she is still trying to keep up appearances, as if we both hadn’t experienced worse from our chosen men. “Boys will be boys.” She laughs.
Yours sure will.
After dinner, Graham suggests a walk. He says it inconspicuously, with a sly smile only I would catch. It was the weekend of arbitrary traditions so why not pile another one on top of the stack?
I’d spent the last hour eating grilled chicken and sautéed vegetables and talking about nothing. The Walkers are good at that—talking about nothing. Skimming the surface without actually saying anything of importance. The appearance of care was there, knowing just enough to have a response should Doug’s coworker ask about the wedding or Cheryl’s Pilates instructor ask what Henry got for his birthday, but it was absent of any interest. Like they were afraid to divulge too much to one another. Like saying the wrong word would be held over their heads for the rest of their lives.
I’d witnessed cracks in this indifferent foundation twice, which led me to believe that there was a time before me when they actually cared. And seeing the presence of that love, however fleeting, made me think about what must have happened to break it.
The Walkers’ fifteen acres sit on the peak of the mountain, surrounded by views to the south and lush color-changing trees to the north, east, and west. Graham likes to go on walks into the wooded part of the property, around the lake that sits peacefully on the edge of their land, remote and unbothered. Probably eight of the fifteen acres they have are woods, and those are Graham’s favorite parts. Not the house or the pool or the hot tub or tennis court. The woods.
“There are bears around here but I’ll protect you,” Graham had said during our walk the first time I ever visited the compound. He put his arms around my shoulders like that was all it would take to ward off a hungry beast. The animal would be so intimidated by Graham’s flexing biceps that it would run in the opposite direction.
In reality, I’d be the one protecting him. Or feeding him to it. That just depended on the day.
I’d been face-to-face with a black bear before. Everyone knows they’re more afraid of humans than humans are of them. Being attacked by a black bear would be rarer than getting attacked by a cow. Only one of the two allows you to die with a little dignity, though.
We had black bears around the farm when I was growing up. Once a week, my mother would fill a spray bottle with cayenne pepper and water and make me walk the perimeter of the land, spraying the ground and the lower half of the trees. It was mostly to keep them from scavenging for food out of the compost and the garden and the chicken pen. When I was eight or nine, I was kicking a rock along the path, spraying in the line of the rock’s passage, and I looked up to see a bear, not three feet from me, the rock underneath its paw like a soccer ball. If I hadn’t looked up, I would have bumped right into it.
We were both frozen still, staring at the other. All I remember thinking was stop, drop, and roll, instructions for if you’re caught on fire, not for when you’re close enough to a wild bear to see its pupils dilating. Stop, drop, and roll. But that was stupid fucking advice.
“Go away,” I said, matter-of-fact, like I was reasoning with one of my brothers over who should get to use the bathroom first. “GO AWAY!” I yelled it a second time, my voice echoing through the trees to sound like two or three people were demanding the animal leave. But it worked. It scurried away so fast, I was sure it wasn’t coming back.
But I’d let Graham protect me. Sure. My little Manhattan-bred fiancé. The idiot would probably stop, drop, and roll.
“Do you want me to come tomorrow? To the caterer?” Graham asks as we round the bend away from the house toward the passage to the lake. His arm was wrapped around my shoulders in that way it was the first time.
“If you want,” I say, knowing he wouldn’t. I didn’t want him there either way. He was so uninvolved in the whole planning process that when he decides to show up, it just confuses things. It’s like trying to have an opinion on something you’ve never thought about before in your entire life. “But I think your mom and I have it handled if you want to make other plans.”
“I think the guys start arriving around noon, so I want to be around when they get here.”
“Then you should stay,” I say, as if this entire conversation wasn’t just an excuse to get me to allow him to hang out with his friends guilt free. They’d be drunk before I got home from the meeting, I knew it. They didn’t have anything to say to each other, so instead they drink to fill the silence. I’m really looking forward to walking into that room.
I spin around and walk backwards a few feet in front of him, watching him watch me.
“We’re almost there,” I say, smiling wryly.
He adjusts himself and continues walking, watching me like a bear stalking its prey.
I see the small patch of poisonous berries—the red kind that Graham reminded me three times never to eat, as if I had a penchant for plucking food from the wild and sticking it into my fucking mouth. Graham’s favorite tree was three feet away from the berry bush. “Go for a walk” was Graham speak for “Let’s have sex at my favorite tree.” I had a favorite tree growing up, too, but this was never something I imagined doing against it.
As we approached the tree, I lifted the back of my coat and dress so my thong was visible and I let him slap my bare ass so hard I was sure it would bruise.
The tree had formed around the corroded stump of another tree and the way the tree’s bark enveloped the stump made it look like an asshole. Like a naked butt was squatting. Graham really knows how to get a girl in the mood.
Graham picks me up and I wrap my legs around his waist until he bangs me up against the tree, pulling at his belt buckle like if this didn’t happen right now he’d explode.
“I love you so much,” he says as we start fucking, which I roll my eyes at behind his back. He gets off on the fact that I’m into this shit. That I’ll have sex whenever, wherever, and we both come every time. But I get turned on not by him but by the show. The idea that someone could be watching us. His brother, his father. My first time—and our first time—was in public, and I never quite got over that rush of getting away with something you shouldn’t. I thrived on it. I came on it.
I also liked the way the tree felt against my back as we moved up and down against it. The way the bark embedded into my skin, scratching my shoulder blades and my back, painful and delicious. Something my makeup team will have to cover up in the morning, but that’s a thought for another day.
We walk back to the house silently but enveloped in each other. His jacket is draped on my shoulders, his arms around me, my head resting on him, our sides and hips pressed together so close I could smell the salty sweat of our sex.
“Can we take the shortcut?” I ask. “I’m freezing.”
He rubs his hands up and down my arms. Sex was a momentary release from the cold, but afterward it was worse; not even my coat could protect me from the cold air clinging to my sweat, sending chills up my spine and my back.
The shortcut was walking along the road instead of through the trees. It was a more direct path that was already cleared and would lead us to the front door in ten minutes instead of thirty.
When we reach the edge of the woods, Graham stops and lets me jump onto his back. I couldn’t walk the gravel in heels, and I couldn’t walk it barefoot. So, a piggyback ride up a steep mountain it is.
“You weigh less than a feather,” Graham says after a few minutes. “If you weren’t breathing on my neck, I wouldn’t even know you were there.”
I let out a long warm puff directly into his ear and then kiss him just below it. I could feel him shivering.
“We’ve got a hot shower in our future,” he says, pretending to be less breathless than he is.
I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. If I let myself think about this place too long, I can feel the panic start to grow, from the hole in which it usually resides in my chest to my neck and stomach and my face and my knees. But sometimes if I close my eyes, I can forget, for just a moment. Forget about everything.
“What the fuck—”
I’m dropped to the floor before I realize what’s going on, landing so hard on my feet I’m not sure I’ll be able to walk tomorrow. The sharp rocks hit my soles and send strikes of pain up my entire body until my knees give out and I fall to the ground.
When I look up, Graham is standing in front of me, staring straight into the woods beside us. His hands are at his sides, balled into fists so tight his white knuckles are reflecting the moonlight.
“A bear?” I ask, slowly getting back on my feet. But when I stand next to him, fully prepared to reason with this animal the same way I did the one at home, I’m speechless. “What is this?” I ask.
Stapled onto the trees in front of us, right on the edge of the gravel road, are posters—dozens of them:
MISSING: BERNADETTE WARD
Beneath that is a photo of a smiling blonde girl. It looks like an oil painting; she is so perfect, her hair so straight, her eyes so blue.
They don’t look like the kind of missing posters I’d seen on Law & Order. They don’t have any details, no age or height or weight, no date she was last seen, no description of her clothes. The more I stare at her, the more it looks like she is staring at me, watching me, pulling me closer and closer until my face meets hers. I reach forward and gently tug the paper off a tree, wanting to get a closer look at her.
“Don’t fucking touch that,” he says.
“Who is she?” I ask, her face smiling up at me like a hopeful child’s.
“I said don’t touch it.” He slaps my hand, hard, until the paper falls out of it and onto the cold ground. Then he rips another poster off another tree. He crumples it up in his hand as he reaches for the next. Then the next. He starts pulling them off two at a time, getting farther and farther into the dark forest as he does it, pulling each and every one off the trees so violently little paper slivers stick to the staples and wave at me in the wind.
“What is this about?” I ask. “Do you know her?”
Graham appears a few moments later, white-knuckling the posters like if he squeezed hard enough they’d disappear. Just like her, I guess.
“It’s an old case,” he says. “I don’t know anything about her. This makes our neighborhood look unsafe. And with everyone coming up here tomorrow—” He starts walking up the mountain toward the house, leaving me standing there by myself, the tough gravel maiming the bottoms of my feet. But I know better than to call him back. I know better than to ask any more questions.
I pick the last poster up from the ground and look at her.
MISSING: BERNADETTE WARD.
I fold up the paper and slip it into my bra.
Then I follow him up the mountain in silence.