“DAMN,” JONATHAN MERRYFIELD groaned.
He removed his eyeglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, set his glasses back on and shifted in the passenger’s seat of the Land Rover as its headlights raked across the brick-and-ivy façade of the creamery.
“What is it?” Bethany said.
Jon shook his head, as if to rid a bad memory. “That kid.” He sighed. “That boyfriend. Whoever he is. We’re going to have to let her go.” He moaned and hugged his stomach. Bethany killed the Rover’s engine and headlights. The creamery windows fell black. She rested a palm on her husband’s shoulder. “Feeling any better?”
“If by better you mean I don’t feel like I am about to vomit all of my insides. No.”
“Sorry I insisted we go,” Bethany said and pulled her hand from the shoulder of her husband, who’d spent the end of their evening in the restaurant restroom. Suffering. She felt poorly for insisting they go out to dinner just because that’s what they always did on Wednesday nights. Insisting was her nature: insisting on things that seemed imperative at their inception, vital and necessary—an urgency created out of the anxiety of wanting perfection, and afterward seemed so trivial. Often her demands involved events that even she did not want to attend, but felt she should attend. Jon always obliged, predictably. It infuriated her, his predictability. Why, for once, couldn’t he stand up for himself and say, No. We’re not going out. I’m still sick. They both could have stayed home and rested. Instead, he’d caved. How was a man who was so aggressive, commanding, manipulative, and steadfast in his thorny and taxing professional life so dithering in his personal life? It was as though he were two completely different men. And, by the way: When had she come to disdain the consistency and stability, the predictability, she’d worked most her adult life to obtain and had once claimed she’d wanted and even admired in a spouse?
“I’ll talk to the girl,” Bethany said. She had spotted the boy herself once, sliding off in the darkness a few weeks earlier. She’d spoken with Jessica about him. “You can have girlfriends over. But no more boys.” Oh, how the poor girl’s cheeks had reddened, as flush as if she’d been slapped across the face. “It won’t happen again,” Jessica had blurted, then crossed, actually crossed, her heart and hoped to die.
Bethany understood Jessica better than Jessica knew. Jessica would be shocked out of her panties to learn just how many boys Bethany had entertained in high school when she’d babysat, or while her parents had been out at yet another of their lousy, obligatory soirees, from which they inevitably returned pickled and bickering. One such Sunday, when Bethany’s parents were off to get soused in Seer Sucker, her father’s business partner, one for whom Bethany babysat, Mr. Alcott, had dropped by to find Bethany home alone basking bikini-clad beside the pool, her brain fuzzed from the beating sun and a half pitcher of her mother’s gin and tonics already slipping around inside her. She’d turned seventeen, just the day before. “Why, Little Beth,” Mr. Alcott had said and sat beside her on the edge of her chaise longue. “I see the cat’s away.” Bethany had adjusted her top, which was unstrung, and cupped her hand to her brow, eyeing him and glancing at his Carmen Ghia, parked in the driveway. She had felt the sweat bead on her upper lip. “Apparently,” she’d said, rolling her tongue inside her mouth to taste the tart bite of lemon, the juniper of gin. Mr. Alcott had set his smooth, manicured hand on her tanned calf. “Care to go for a ride?”
The ride had lasted all summer.
She’d never told a soul. Not even Jon. If ever she prided herself on anything, it was her ability to keep secrets. It had served her well.
Bethany stepped out of the Land Rover and hurried around to assist Jon. His tie was slack around his neck. His shirt rumpled and untucked. His face shiny with perspiration.
Bethany escorted him up the front walk. Their motion activated the walkway lights. Bethany opened the front door and ushered her husband inside.
The baby was crying.
Bethany’s heart registered the sound before her ears heard it.
No. Not crying.
Wailing.
The house was a riot of wailing. It reverberated throughout the creamery, from it. The terrible plaint of a baby abandoned.
Bethany envisioned Jessica servicing some pimply, groping boy while baby Jon shrieked. The little bitch. “Jessica!” Bethany hollered from the bottom of the staircase. She kicked off her Ferragamos and slung herself up the stairs two at a time, leaving Jon slumped on the edge of the deacon’s bench, head in his hands. “Jessica!” Bethany cried again.
Baby Jon yowled so it seemed his tonsils would rupture in a mist of blood. The sound leeched the marrow from Bethany’s bones.
Atop the stairs, Bethany ran down the hallway, bawling: “Jessica!’’
Bethany burst into the baby’s room. She threw on the light and raced to the crib. Little Jon. His scrunched and purple face was swollen and sopped. Bethany scooped him up, a feverish churn of legs and arms. She pressed him to her breast, stroked his head. “Shhhhh. It’s all right. Mama’s here. Shhh.”
His screams diminished. Bethany took him downstairs, her pulse throbbing in her wrists. She hurried over to her husband. “Jon. Something’s wrong.”
Jon lifted his head from his hands, looking as though he might vomit; but he stood at the word wrong.
“Wrong?” he said. He touched the baby’s shoulder, rubbed it with his fingertips.
“Jessica,” Bethany said. “She isn’t here.”
“She has to be here,” Jon said.
“I’ve been shouting for her. I checked the baby’s room. She’s not allowed to be in any of the other rooms upstairs, except the bathroom.”
“She’s not allowed to fuck boys on our couch either.”
“You need to pull yourself together and do something.”
Jon stepped past Bethany and began to climb the stairs, using the rail for support.
With baby Jon clutched to her breast, Bethany searched the kitchen, the study, the library, the dining room, the parlor, and the guest bedroom, where Jon slept of late; his deluge of work and his stomach bug keeping him sleepless. The bedroom was off-limits to Jessica, though who knew what anyone got up to in private? Bethany had certainly snooped around as a babysitter. As she strode across the living room, she stopped. The cellar door was open, just a hair. But it was normally shut tight unless someone was downstairs.
Baby Jon stirred in Bethany’s arms. She balanced him and opened the cellar door. The sad yellow light of the cellar’s single bulb died at the bottom of the stairs. Bethany felt an icy blade of guilt slice between her ribs. The radio was playing. Jessica was doing laundry. Since being caught with the boy—and despite Bethany insisting she need not bother—Jessica had taken to doing chores after Little Jon was in bed and Jessica’s homework was finished. Jessica was downstairs now and had not heard Bethany and Jon come home over the sounds of the radio. The old stone foundation, the beams and trusses, the thick floors, they cut you off from the world. Bethany’s one stipulation was Jessica take the baby monitor down there. But Bethany had forgotten it herself on plenty of occasions. Once, she’d come from the cellar to find baby Jon crying as if he were being held to a hot stove. How quickly she’d leapt to crucify the girl.
“Jessica,” Bethany said, her voice bare of anger. “Jessica.”
She descended the stairs.
With each step she called the girl’s name.
With each step her voice pitched louder. “Jessica.”
JON MERRYFIELD WAS upstairs in the master bedroom, noting that the bedsheets were amiss, when he heard his wife howl.