Stan came home when she was getting ready to leave. He put on his Old World banker manners for Daphne and you could tell she was lapping it all up. Her husband must really be a brute. It made me feel a little sorry for her.
I took a little nap while Stan gave Chloë her bath. After all, I’d been with her all day and all Stan does all day is golf and sit around thinking of ways to invest my money. He woke me up after she was asleep and brought me a protein shake “to keep my strength up.” He’s still worried about all the weight I lost after Chloë was born.
“Do you want me to plump up like Daphne?” I asked.
He actually pretended not to know who I was talking about for a minute, which told me he’d noticed her just fine.
“Oh, your little protégée,” he said at last. “I predict she won’t be plump for long.”
I asked him what he meant by that, and he gave me his raised-eyebrow look. “C’mon, Laurel, you know what you do. You befriend some poor mouse of a girl who follows you around like a besotted cocker spaniel and then when you tire of her you drop her off at the pound.”
“That’s totally untrue,” I told him, but not with a lot of energy.
“Your college roommate, that girl in Scotland, Roisin, your yoga instructor . . .”
“So I’m not good at girlfriends,” I said. “I hadn’t even thought of Daphne as a real friend. I’m just doing the mommy-bonding thing. Isn’t that why you sent me to this group?”
“I didn’t send you anywhere, Laurel,” he said. “We both agreed it was for the best. And I only mention those other girls because you so often get . . . disappointed and I know you’re a little fragile right now.”
I hate it when Stan treats me like an invalid, but I felt too tired to argue. Daphne isn’t anything like Carrie or Roisin or Monique. They’d all turned out to be phonies. Daphne, for all her simpering, isn’t a phony. She’s real. She might be the realest person I’ve ever met. She just needs a little tweaking.
Chapter Fourteen
Once I stop fighting being Laurel Hobbes my life gets easier.
Quelle surprise! I can hear Laurel say, It’s easier being a rich heiress than trailer-park trash.
I could point out that I did not grow up in a trailer park, but I’m trying not to argue with my voices. With all the meds I’m still on, I never know when I might blurt something out and talking to invisible people is just the kind of behavior to get you sent back to the Green Room. I still have bedsores from my three weeks there—three weeks of my life I’ll never get back.
“We had to sedate you to keep you from harming yourself,” Dr. Hancock explained in our first session together. I responded by throwing a chair at him. Turns out, that’s another way to get sent back to the Green Room. I was there another week—at least, that’s what I’m told.
The next time he brings up my sedation I channel Laurel’s sangfroid. “I can see why that was necessary,” I say, biting the inside of my mouth. And voilà! I was transferred to my own private room (courtesy, no doubt, of Laurel’s trust fund) with a window. True, it has bars on it, but at least I can see the sky and a patch of grass and even a view of the tower. When I first saw that, I thought it must be a punishment of some sort, a taunt of what I’ve lost. And then I realized it was a test.
“Do you like your new room?” Dr. Hancock asks me at our next session.
“I’m happy to be in a room with a window,” I say cautiously. “I missed being able to tell if it was day or night.”
“I thought you might like a view of the tower,” he says, “to remind you of your old life and work.”
Asshole, Laurel says inside my head.
“It’s something to work toward,” I say. “Is . . . is . . . Chloe still there?”
“Which Chloe?” he asks.
Careful, Laurel warns.
I can feel the pull of the undercurrent tugging me down. “Daphne’s baby. The one I brought with me. Did Peter take her home?”
“Yes,” he says. And then, after a pause, “Don’t you want to know about your Chloë?”
Caught you! Laurel crows.
But I’m ready for this. “I know Stan will be taking good care of her. That must have been why I was able to leave her behind.”
“Do you remember deciding to take Daphne’s Chloe?”
“No,” I tell him honestly—and that one word of truth feels like a cut in my skin, exposing me to infection. Maybe this isn’t the best topic, Laurel advises, but I need to know. “I have . . . images of going up a flight of stairs. The carpet is wet. At the top of the stairs is a bathroom . . .” My bathroom, I want to say, but I catch myself. “Where was she—Daphne—found?”
“In her bathtub,” he answers. “Where else?”
“It’s just . . . our houses look alike.” All those ticky-tacky houses. “In my memory I’m in Lau—my house.”
“I see,” he says in that annoying way psychiatrists have of acting like they know you better than you know yourself. “But why would Daphne kill herself in your bathtub?”
Good question, Laurel says. An even better one would be how did I wind up dead in your bathtub?
It is a good question, but I don’t have time to think about it before Dr. Hancock asks what else I remember. “Red,” I say. “Red everywhere. When I walked into the bathroom, the floor was covered with red
