Under My Skin

“He’s no one,” I say.

I wouldn’t say I’m exactly dating. There’s a snow globe on my desk, a little farmhouse surrounded by trees. Jack gave it to me one Christmas. This is what our house will look like, out in the country. Quiet. Away from all the chatter. I tip it and watch the snow swirl around the black branches.

“I saw your profile online,” says Ben. He peers over his glasses, a gesture he thinks makes him look wise, worldly. It really doesn’t. He’s far too young to be either of those things.

Putting the snow globe down, I lean back in my chair and frown at him.

“What are you doing on an online dating site, a young hottie like you? They must drop like flies.”

He shoots me a faux-smarmy eyebrow raise. “That’s what we do. The millennials? It’s how we roll. Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com. Love is just a swipe away.” He makes a wave motion with his hand.

“So, it’s not just for old people, then?” I sift through the tiny white sheets of paper. “The divorced, the forever single—the widowed.”

Widowed. I hate that word; it evokes black veils and wails of grief. It defines me by the loss of my husband, as though I’m less now that he’s gone. Of course—I am. I regret saying it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. The word hangs in the air between us. When I look up from my messages, Ben has me pinned in a thoughtful gaze. Another youngster with an old soul; it seems we have a type in our small firm.

“If you must know, it wasn’t my idea.”

“Let me guess.” He shifts forward, puts his elbows on his knees.

“Layla came over. Wine was consumed. The next thing I know, I’m back in the dating scene.”

I don’t think you can clinically call what I’m doing dating. In the olden days, we used to refer to it as sleeping around. A relationship? A boyfriend? No. I don’t want those things. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But, wow, does it ever feel good to be touched again. I don’t share this with Ben, who is studiously massaging that hipster beard he’s so proud of. I wish he’d cut it off. It’s borderline offensive, though I can’t say why precisely.

“It’s a good thing,” he says finally, rising. “And Rick sounds like kind of a nice guy. He’s hot, too. Looks like he could have money.”

“You checked him out?” I say, mock mortified.

“Uh,” he says, widening his eyes. “Yeah.”

I smile at my young friend, my assistant who has outgrown his position but still likes it. If he has a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—or whatever—he never says so. I open my email; an impossible number of messages await.

“Two calls in a day,” says Ben, moving toward the door. “I like his confidence. A man who knows what he wants.”

“Confidence or arrogance?” I ask. “Desperation?”

“Let’s call it—” Beard rubbing, word searching. “Assertiveness.”

“Send him an email, will you? Tell him drinks on Thursday?” I ask.

“From you or from me?”

“Would it be weird if it was from you?”

“Seriously weird,” he says, then rethinks. “Well—more like pretentious. Have your people call my people? Do you want to be that person?”

“Fine—from me.”

Ben frequently sends emails at my direction from my account. Never anything big, just setting meeting times, quick one-line answers to various questions.

“Where?”

I shrug. “I don’t care. He can choose.”

Ben hesitates in the door a minute, his lanky form in my peripheral vision. Then he leaves me and I am alone with that image staring back at me from my smartphone. I close the photo app and put the device down, shut my eyes and draw in a few deep breaths. That’s the other thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trying to move on, to smooth out the edges of the panic, sadness, anger or whatever overtakes you—focus on the breath. Breathe, they tell you.

Whatever that pill was, it has smoothed out the edges some, for sure. I’m lighter, less shaky.

But—honestly—I’m scared; fear tickles at the back of my throat. There’s a white noise of anxiety in the back of my head. It’s not just the man in the shadows, on the train. He is scary, sure. If there really is someone following me, then yes, it’s weird and frightening. What’s scarier, though, given my history, is if there isn’t.

* * *

I finish out the day, and work late, pushing everything else away. There are contracts to review, emails to answer, a dispute between a fashion photographer and a model she supposedly came on to, then ejected from a shoot when he refused her, another dispute between a feature photographer who’d submitted photos to a travel magazine, filed for payment via their Kafkaesque system, and ninety days later still hadn’t been paid. Work is easy, a cocoon that keeps the chaos of life away.

When I look up from my desk again it’s after seven and all the other offices are dark. The refrigerator in our break room hums, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound. Half of the hallway lights are off, leaving the space dim and shadowy. I know Ben was the last to leave and he locked me in on the way out, reminding me to set the alarm when I finally took off for the night.

As I’m packing my bag, a phone starts ringing in one of the offices. It bounces to the main line, and I reach over to pick it up. There’s no number on the caller ID, but I see that it came from Maura’s extension. Maybe it’s Alvaro; he used to call late for Jack. We’ve drifted since Jack’s death, not that he and I were ever really friends. In fact, despite his extraordinary talent, and his close friendship to Jack, I’ve always considered him a giant asshole. I really hope, for Maura’s sake, that she hasn’t fallen for him.

“Lang and Lang.”

There’s just a crackling on the line.

“Hello?” A strange sense of urgency pulls me forward in my seat.

There’s a voice but so much interference that I can barely make it out. I hang on awhile longer, listening. A strain of music. The blast of a horn. That voice, it’s throaty and deep, talking quickly, unintelligible through the static. Is it familiar?

Poppy. I think he says my name. Something about it sets my nerve endings tingling.

“Yes, this is Poppy. Sorry—I can’t hear you.”

I press my ear to the phone, cover the other to hear better. But the connection finally just goes dead, and a hard dip of disappointment settles into my stomach. I wait, thinking the phone will ring again. But it doesn’t.

With a niggling sense of unease, I move away from the phone. That voice. My name on the line. Or was it?

I pack up my bag and loop the office, making sure lights are down and doors are locked. It’s a small space; there are only five of us. Walls are made from glass, so there are few places in the office that can’t be seen from wherever you stand. Still, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being watched. I lock the door behind me, head down in the elevator.

“Working late,” says Sam, the night security guard at the desk. He has a worn paperback novel in his hands. He and Jack used to talk about books, sharing a love of science and history. I glance at the title: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.

“Light reading?”

“The brain,” he says, tapping his capped skull. He has dark circles under his eyes, a strange depth to his gaze. An insomniac who works nights, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq. “It’s the ultimate mystery. We know less about it than we do about space.”

Jack would know what to say; he’d probably have read whatever Sam was reading. They’d chat for ten minutes while I kept busy answering emails on my smartphone. But I just nod, aware of the sad way he looks at me. Most people look at me like this now, at least sometimes. The widow.

“Take care of yourself,” he says as I head toward the door. There is a gravity to his words, but when I turn back, he’s already gone back to his reading.

* * *

On the street, shadows fill doorways and pool around parked cars. But no hooded man, just a young couple walking, hands linked, leaning into each other, an old woman with a shopping cart, a lanky kid walking and texting. A yellow cab swiftly pulls to the curb. Safe inside, I turn to look behind me once more.

Maybe, maybe something moves in the shadows across the street. But it’s hard to be sure.

3

Instead of going home, I head to Layla’s, dropping her a text so that she knows to expect me. Not even five seconds pass before her reply. She’s always half expecting me for dinner these days—which makes me feel some combination of grateful and guilty.

We’re having meatloaf. Gma’s recipe.

Whose grandma she is talking about, I’m not sure. Mine, hers or Mac’s? There certainly wasn’t any famous meatloaf recipe in my family. Layla’s brood wasn’t exactly the gather-around-the-Sunday-table type, and most of them are long gone. Mac comes from a long line of glittering one percenters; meatloaf is not on the menu. Maybe she was just being ironic.

Yay! I type. Uh—whose gma?

When the phone pings again, the text is not from Layla.

Hope you’re well, it reads. I’d love to see you again. No pressure. Just drinks?

The name on the phone gives me pause. Of all my recent assignations, he stays with me. I try not to think about the night we shared, but it comes back in gauzy scenes. His touch—gentle but urgent; his laugh—easy, deep. Sandy curls, like Jack’s. Something else just beneath the surface—what was it? There’s a little catch of excitement in my breath, but I quickly quash it. No. I’m not ready for anything more than we shared. I’ve told him as much. I briefly consider responding. It would be another easy night, an escape hatch from my life.

Layla’s text distracts me: I was just being ironic. I got the recipe from the internet—like everything else.

I hesitate another moment, remembering the feel of him, then delete his message without response.

Cold. I know.

* * *

Layla’s Central Park West address is gray and regal with a private motor court, multiple sparkling, marble lobbies manned by a small army of smartly uniformed doormen. It’s a fairy tale, a castle for the ultrawealthy. The towering lobby ceiling dwarfs me as I enter. The scent of fresh-cut flowers and the glitter of the chandelier above create a ballroom effect. Story-tall abstract oils, white leather sectionals, a twisting metal sculpture—there are museum lobbies with less grandeur.

Real people don’t live in buildings like this, Jack would say. He’d seen too much of the world in his lens—people living in poverty, children starving, cities ruined by war, nature decimated by corporate greed. Obscene wealth offended him. Me—not so much. I drift through worlds, as comfortable in a hostel as I am at the Ritz. Living in opulence or squalor, under the skin people are just the same. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. It just looks different from the outside.

My heels click on the marble, the staccato bouncing off the walls. Allegedly, Sting lives here. Robert DeNiro lives here. (Though I’ve never seen either of them.) Those mysterious Russian billionaires you always hear about live here. My dear friends Layla and Mac Van Santen live here with their teenagers, Izzy and Slade.

I still don’t completely understand what Mac does. Finance, of course. Hedge fund manager—but what does that really mean? I also don’t get how in the last ten years, he got so crazy-beyond-ridiculously rich. Something to do with “shorts” and the mortgage bond crisis of 2007. Suddenly there was a move from the perfectly spectacular Tribeca loft to the Central Park West penthouse. The monthlong summer trips overseas. The family driver, Carmelo. The private plane at an airport in Long Island.

Layla and I share a laugh over this now and then—mirthlessly—how much things have changed since we were kids together. How her mother worked two jobs. How my parents bought her prom dress when her family couldn’t afford it, how her parents fought in the kitchen over stacks of bills they couldn’t pay. How my dad and I would drive to her place and pick her up when she couldn’t stand the yelling and worse. Her parents are both dead now, having led, short, unhappy, unhealthy lives. But Layla still bears the scars they left on her, literally and figuratively.

The doorman, unsmiling but deferential, knows me and waves me through without bothering to call up.

“Have a good evening, Ms. Lang.”

The floral scent from the lobby follows me into the mirrored elevator. I drift up to the twenty-eighth floor as though on a cloud, silken and silent, emerging in the private foyer.

Pushing through the door into Layla’s penthouse apartment, I’m greeted by the sound of Izzy practicing her violin in the room down the hall. Whatever piece she’s struggling through is unrecognizable. The sheer size of their space, the thick walls, keep the sound from being unbearable as surely my early instrumental attempts were to my parents—the clarinet, later the flute. I remember their strained encouragement, their palpable relief, when I discovered that my passion was the totally silent artistic endeavor of photography.

Let’s just say that Izzy is no musical prodigy, either; I wonder when or if she’ll be told. She practices with gusto, though, attacking the same few musical phrases over and over. If it’s a matter of sheer will alone, she might improve. She’s a high achiever like her father, focused, unrelenting, a star student.

Slade, her younger brother, is at the kitchen island FaceTiming with a friend on his iPad while they play some weird world-building game on a laptop. Two screens are apparently required for this interaction. I plant a kiss on his head, am rewarded with a high five, and his megawatt smile. Slade’s more like Layla—or like Layla used to be. Easy, laid-back, distractible and artistic.

Layla’s at the stove; the table set with fresh flowers, cloth napkins, gleaming platinum silverware. There are only four places, which I take to mean that Mac is not going to be home for dinner. The usual state of affairs.

“Please put that away and tell your sister it’s time to eat,” Layla says to Slade as she comes over to give me a hug.

“Izzy!” Slade bellows, startling us both into laughter. “Dinner!”

“I could have done that,” says Layla, swatting him on the shoulder. “Tell Brock you have to go. Goodbye, Brock.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Van Santen,” comes the disembodied voice from the iPad.

“Did you finish your homework?” she asks Slade when he’s closed his laptop.

He looks at her with Mac’s hazel eyes, an uncertain frown furrowing his brow. He’s a heartthrob, all big eyes and pouty lips, thick mop of white-blond curls. Fourteen years old and already towering over Layla and me.

“No more gaming until it’s done,” says Layla. “Now go get your sister. Clearly, she can’t hear us.”

More screeching from behind Izzy’s closed door as if to punctuate the point. Slade moves in that direction as slowly as a sloth, knocks, then disappears into Izzy’s room.

“That violin teacher keeps telling me that she has promise,” Layla says, moving back over to the stove. “Am I crazy? She sounds truly awful, right?”

“I heard that,” yells Izzy, emerging. No one ever says anything in the Van Santen house. “I am awful! Obviously. This was your idea, Mom!”

Layla rolls her eyes as Izzy tackles me from behind, kissing me on the cheek. Her hair is spun gold; she smells of lilacs. She’s lean and fit, but no skinny waif. I’ve seen her and her field hockey–playing girlfriends put away their body weight in pizza.

“Save me from all of this, Aunt Poppy,” she says. “Can I come live with you?”

“I know, darling,” I say, holding on to her tight. She used to sit in my lap, kick her chubby legs and laugh as I changed her diapers, and squeeze her tiny hand in mine as we crossed the street. Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don’t have your own?

“How do you bear up under these conditions? It’s miserable.”

“Mom, please,” says Izzy. She walks over to her mother, picks a carrot out of the salad and starts to munch. “I’m just not musical.”

“It’s good for you, sweetie,” says Layla easily. She pushes a strand of stray hair from Izzy’s eyes. “To do something you’re not great at immediately. To work for something.”

“That’s—ridiculous.”

The teenager, so like her mother, blond with startling jewel-green eyes, casts me a pleading look. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

Savory aromas waft from the oven and range top, making my stomach rumble. I used to cook, too. Jack and I both loved being in the kitchen. Lately, when I’m not here, I survive on a diet of salad bar offerings and maybe Chinese takeout when I’m feeling ambitious. I help Izzy get the water.

At the table, I let the chaos wash over me—Izzy going on about some mean-girl drama, Slade begging to add a robotics club to his already packed schedule. All the heaviness, the strangeness of my day lifts for a moment.

But my inner life is a roller coaster. I think: this is the life Jack and I could have had; maybe not the insane wealth—but the chattering kids and the food on the stove and the homework. The happy mess of it all; it could have been ours. And then the ugly rise of anger; we were robbed of this. I stare at the water in my glass. Followed then by the stomach-dropping plummet of despair: What is there when I leave here? A dark apartment, void of him and the life we were building.

Layla’s hand on mine. The kids are looking at me.

“Poppy?” she says softly. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” I say. “Sorry.”

A ringing device causes Layla to rise from the table. I hear the electronic swoop as she answers.

“Wait, don’t tell me,” she says. “You’re going to be late. I shouldn’t wait up.”

Her tone is light, but there’s an edge to it, too.

“There’s just a lot going on right now.” Mac on speaker apparently. No—FaceTime. She comes to the table with her iPad, sits back down beside me. Even on the screen I can see the circles under his eyes. He rubs at his bald head, his tie loose and the top button on his shirt open. “You know that, honey.”

Layla softens, smiles at the screen. “I know. We just miss you.”

“Hi, Mac,” I say.

“Hi, Dad,” the kids chorus.

“Hey, guys.”

“Poppy’s my husband now,” says Layla. She tosses me a smile. “She’s in your place.”

“I hope you two will be very happy together,” says Mac with a light laugh. “Poppy, good luck.”

I blow him a kiss.

“Izzy, sweetie, how did you do on your calculus test?” he asks.

Layla passes her the iPad.

“I’m confident,” she says, covering her mouth, still chewing. These kids, all confidence, no worries. When did that happen? What happened to teen angst? I used to lie in bed at night worrying—about grades, about friend drama, about everything.

“Did you check your work?” he asks.

More chewing. “Uh-huh,” she says. “I got this, Dad.”

Izzy hands the iPad to Slade. “Dad, this is the last week to sign up for robotics.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She said not unless my grades come up.” Slade casts a sad-eyed look at his mom, which she ignores.

“Then that’s the decision.”

Is it fatigue that makes his voice sound that way, flat, distant? Or the crush of it all—work and family, marriage, pretty from the outside, exhausting from the inside.

Slade, still undeterred, launches in about how by the time he can prove he’ll get his grades up, it will be too late. They go back and forth for a few minutes.

“FaceTime parenting,” whispers Layla. I don’t like her flat tone, either, or the kind of sad distance I see on her face; it’s new. “It’s all the rage.”

“You okay?”

She puts on a smile, but looks down at her plate. “Yeah,” she says, false bright. “Yeah, of course. Just—tired.”

I catch Izzy watching us with a worried frown.

“Dad says what if I sign up for robotics and quit if my grades don’t come up?” Slade cuts in.

Layla looks to the screen, annoyed. But the iPad is dark; Mac is gone.

“Your father and I will discuss it later and give you a decision tomorrow.”

“Robotics is the future, Mom.”

Layla puts down her fork and locks Slade in a stare. “Ask me again and the answer is no.”

Everyone knows that tone; Slade falls silent and looks at his plate. The mom tone—which means you’ve reached the limit of her patience and you’re about to lose big. I take a bite of meatloaf. Wherever she got the recipe, it’s great. I’ve cleared my whole plate. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Layla’s barely touched hers. Which I guess is why she’s a size zero.

“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word into sad defeat.

Izzy gets up, scraping the chair loudly, clearing her plate. “I promised to call Abbey.”

Somehow the mood has changed, the happy chatter died down, a stillness settling.

* * *

Layla and I settle into the white expanse of her living room—everything low and soft, the gas fireplace lit, photography books laid out on the reclaimed wood coffee table, a bottle of pinot opened between us. I want to tell her about the hooded man, but I don’t. She’ll panic, launch into fix-it mode, and I don’t need that right now.

We’ve been friends since eighth grade. But friend is such a tepid word, isn’t it? A throwaway word that can mean any level of acquaintance. What do you call someone who’s shared your whole life, who seems to know you better than you know yourself, accepts all your many flaws and weaknesses as just flubs in the fabric of who you are? The person you can call at any hour. The one who could show up at your house in the middle of the night with a body in the trunk of her car, and you’d help her bury it. Or vice versa. That’s Layla.

“Mac’s working late,” I say, tossing it out there.

She lifts her eyebrows. “That’s Mac. It’s what he does. He works.”

She seems to wear the opulence around us, slipping into it easily like a silk robe. The expensive fabrics on her body drape; her pedicured toes are pretty, white-pink squares. Her skin practically glows from regular treatments. It would be easy to think she came from wealth, that this was all she knew. But I remember how she grew up. The fingerprint bruises on the inside of her arm from one of her father’s “bad nights.” How my mother used to pack extra food in my lunch box in case Layla came to school without and with no money to buy anything. We don’t talk about it much anymore, the abuse, the neglect. Ancient history, Layla says.

“It’s easier I think,” she says, looking down into her glass. “For him. To be at work than here with us. It’s messy at home, you know. Lots of noise, emotions, ups and downs—family, life. Numbers sit in tidy columns. You add them up and it all makes sense.”

When Jack and I first started the agency, Mac helped figure out the finances.

One night, he came to our apartment after work, and sat at our kitchen table covered with a swath of spreadsheets and documents. Layla and I grew bored, drifted away from the table. But the boys stayed up late talking about pension plans and salaries, quarterly taxes, insurance costs.

Layla and I opened a bottle of wine, lay on the couch listening to their voices, low and serious.

“Are you sure this is what you guys want?” she asked that night.

“The agency?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Won’t you miss it? The assignments, the travel, you know—the excitement of it?”

There was something odd in her tone. “Do you miss it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “The kids keep me busy,” she says. “But, yeah, sometimes.”

I was surprised by this; it never occurred to me that Layla was less than happy.

Her Facebook posts and Instagram feeds were a cheerful tumble of beautiful pictures of the kids, family trips, idyllic Sunday breakfasts, strolls in the park. Layla and Mac in love, wealthy, with two gorgeous, gifted children. Fakebook, Jack liked to call it. A bulletin board of our pretty moments, all the rest of it hidden.