Under My Skin

“I guess we all make our choices,” she said, flat and final. “I mean, we’re blessed. I’m—grateful.”

“Mac loves the kids,” she says now. “He’s always there for them. He’s never missed a performance or a party—they call, he answers.”

“He loves you.”

That much I know. Though Mac can be stiff and isn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist, sometimes even a little blank, his face lights up when Layla talks. He watches her with love in his eyes. Personally, I think he’s on the spectrum, a genius with numbers but maybe struggling elsewhere. Not an unusual combination. But since Jack’s death, Mac has spent many an evening at the office with me, educating me on everything Jack used to handle. He’s patient, gentle, explaining and re-explaining as often as necessary without a trace of annoyance. He’s been there for me, just like Layla. These people—they’re my family.

Layla rubs at the back of her shoulder, seems about to say something but then it dies on her lips, replaced by a wan smile.

“I know,” she says. “Of course he does. Seventeen years.”

She takes a sip from her wineglass, the lights behind her twinkling in a sea of dark. In daylight, the room looks out onto Central Park—an expanse of green, or autumn colors, or white. “It’s okay. We can’t change each other. Most of us who stay married know that.”

Jack and I had just passed our eighth-year wedding anniversary before he died, so I don’t comment. But I don’t remember ever wanting to change him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sitting forward and looking stricken. “The stupid things I say sometimes.”

I lift a hand. “Don’t walk on eggshells. Don’t do that.”

“So what’s going on with you, then?” she asks. “Something—so don’t lie.”

“Nothing,” I lie. She doesn’t buy it, doesn’t push, but keeps her gaze on me.

“I saw Dr. Nash today,” I say, just to put something out there. “She wants me to get off the sleeping pills.”

“Why?” says Layla, pouring us each another glass of wine. I don’t stop her, though I’ve had enough, and the pills earlier. This is our second bottle. “Fuck that. Take what you need to sleep. This year’s been hard enough. You tell her—”

I tune her out. She’s always had a mouth on her, always the fighter, the one standing up, speaking out. For some reason I flash on her arguing with one of her high school boyfriends. We were in the parking lot after a football game. She hit him on the head with her purse. You fucker! she’d screamed, as we all watched. I dragged her off; she kept yelling. The look on his face, like he’d never experienced anger before. Maybe he hadn’t. Layla wept in my car afterward. What had she been so mad about that night? I don’t even remember—or who the boy was, or who else was there. Just the bright spotlights from the field, some girls giggling, the smell of cut grass and Layla’s voice slicing the night.

“Poppy,” she says.

“What?”

I’m getting the mom look, the one she gives her kids when they’re not listening.

“I asked if she took you off the pills.”

“She lowered the dosage.”

“And.”

“My dreams.” My dream images of Jack from last night mingle with the shadow on the subway, the odd daydream I experienced on the train. “They’re more vivid. I don’t feel as rested.”

“Tell her to put the dose back up,” she says sharply. “You need your rest, Poppy.”

“I want to get off them.” The words sound weak even to my own ears. Do I really? “I don’t want to take pills to sleep for the rest of my life.”

“Why not? Better living through chemistry. Lots of people are medicated all their lives.” She lifts her glass like she’s proving a point.

I don’t know if she’s kidding or not. What’s certain is that I’m duller, mentally heavier. I haven’t had a camera in my hand since Jack died, haven’t taken one serious photograph. The truth is I don’t even feel the urge. Is it the grief? The drugs? Some combination of those things. I put the glass down on the table, where it glitters accusingly. How many have I had? Is it weird that I don’t even know?

She drops it. We chat awhile longer, just gossip about the firm, how I think Maura and Alvaro might be involved. I think I see something cross Layla’s face at the mention of Alvaro’s name, but then it’s gone. She tells me that she’s started shooting again. Layla has an eye for faces. They blossom before her lens, reveal all their secrets. Her favorite subjects in recent years, naturally, have been her children. She still maintains her website, has an Instagram feed with a decent following. She has real talent, more than I ever had.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Not more beautiful shots of my gorgeous children. After Slade and Izzy go to school, I head out the way I used to. Just looking for it, you know, that perfect moment.”

“Show me,” I say, curious.

“I will.” She looks away. It’s not like her to be shy. “I’m rusty. I’ve spent so many years on the kids—maybe I’ve lost my eye. What small amount of talent I had, maybe it just withered up and died.”

“I doubt that,” I answer. “Be patient. Maybe you just have a new way of seeing things now.”

She shifts on the couch, folds her legs under her. Something about the way she’s sitting seems uncomfortable, as if she might be in pain. Too much kickboxing. She rubs at her shoulder again. “Life does that I guess.”

She looks at me too long, too sadly. I look away.

“I should get home.” This happens. I’m okay where I am and then suddenly I just need to be alone, like I can’t hold the pieces of myself together anymore.

“Stay here,” she offers. But I’ve spent too many nights in their guest room. Tonight, I need to think. Layla’s life is a cocoon. When I’m here, everything else disappears—the real world seems fuzzy and insubstantial.

I get up, and grab my stuff, get moving before she can talk me into it. She watches me a beat, seems like she wants to say something. But then she rises, too, and doesn’t stop me.

“Wait a second,” she says, then rushes off down the hallway. She’s back in a moment, as I’m pulling on my coat.

“Take these,” she says, pressing a bottle of pills in my hand. “They’re mine. I think that’s the dosage you were on originally.”

I look at the bottle. “Don’t you need them?”

“I can get more.”

“How?” I ask. “Dr. Nash watches me like a junkie.”

Layla smiles. “I have my ways.”

I shouldn’t take them. I should hand them back to her and ask her what the hell she’s talking about. Where is she getting all these pills? And why? But I don’t. I just gratefully shove them in my pocket, promising myself that I won’t take them. Unless. Unless I absolutely need to.

“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?” she asks. “Whatever is going on? I’m here when you’re not okay. Always. Don’t forget that.”

It’s tempting, to come back inside and tell Layla, let her take over in that way she always has. This is what we need to do...

“I’m okay,” I say instead.

4

The Lincoln Town Car waits for me in the motor court. When he spies me, Layla’s towering, refrigerator-sized driver, Carmelo, climbs out quickly and rushes to reach the door before I do, smiles victoriously as he swings it open. He has long blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, faded denim eyes and a jaw like the side of a mountain.

“I got there first, Miss Poppy,” he says.

“This time,” I concede, slipping into the buttery leather interior, and he closes the door.

It’s a thing we have; how I find it ridiculous to wait by the door while he comes around to open it. And he considers door-opening a critical feature of his job, and a terrible dereliction of duty if I open it and get in before he sees me. He’s the rare person who cares about the minute details of his profession. I shouldn’t mess with him. But he’s sweet and funny and we enjoy our little game.

“Home?” he asks.

“Home,” I say, even though I don’t have a home. I have a place where I live, but not a home.

The city rushes past—lights and people, limos, beaters, taxis, bicyclists. I am light, the wine, the pills—I let my head rest against the seat, which seems to embrace me. The hooded man is a distant memory. The car is quiet, except for low jazz coming from the radio; I let my eyes close. Sometimes Carmelo and I chat about his aging mother, his young son, Leo. But he rarely speaks unless I talk to him first, unless he has a question. It’s another standard of his job, to disappear, to be only what you need him to be. When I open my eyes, I catch his in the rearview mirror, watching.

“Long day?” he asks.

“Yes,” I admit. “You?”

“The usual,” he says with a shrug. He takes the kids to school, Mac to work, shuttles Layla through her busy day, waits for Mac in the evenings, takes clients (and friends) around; his day ends when Mac’s does, often not until after midnight or later. Carmelo was always the driver for boys’ night out, when Jack, Alvaro and Mac got together. Shuttling them from bar to bar, maybe to some private card game at Mac’s club, who knows where else.

What could Carmelo tell us about our husbands? Layla mused.

Are you kidding? I’d quip. He’d never tell us anything.

“The city, though, lately. What a mess.”

“Ever think about getting out?”

“Nah,” he says. “Born and raised, you know.”

He pulls to the curb and I just stare for a second, my heart pulsing.

“Carmelo.”

He turns to look at me questioningly, then out at the street. His eyes widen as it dawns.

“Oh, no,” he says, then covers his mouth in a girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Miss Poppy. I’m so sorry.”

He’s taken me to my old apartment building, the one on the Upper West Side where I lived with Jack, not far from Layla’s. A couple I don’t recognize climbs the stairs, laughing, carrying sacks of groceries. She’s petite and wearing jeans, a light black jacket. He’s taller, broad, with an inky mop of hair—young, stylish. It could be us. It was us.

“It’s okay,” I say, biting back a brutal rush of grief, of anger—not at him, at everything.

He pulls away from the curb quickly, cutting off another car and earning the angry bleat of a horn.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, voice heavy with apology. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say again, trying to keep my voice steady. “Easy mistake.”

I look back at my old street, but then he turns the corner and heads downtown. It’s gone. I want to go back; I want to get as far away as possible. I wish that he would drive and drive and that we’d never reach our destination; that I’d just drift in the space between Layla’s life and what’s left of mine forever.

* * *

Back at my place, I open another bottle of wine, pour myself a glass and look around the space. The pain from the sucker punch of seeing my old block has subsided some. And I experience a brief flicker where I feel distantly inspired to decorate, to settle in, as Dr. Nash keeps encouraging. At least unpack the boxes that are still stacked everywhere.

But that moment of inspiration passes as quickly as it came and I find myself reclining instead on the couch. I turn on the television, close my eyes and listen to the local news—an armed robbery in the Bronx, the Second Avenue subway near completion, a missing child found. The measured, practiced voice of the newscaster soothes; my awareness drifts.

* * *

“Jack?”

The bed beside me is cold, the covers tossed back. The clock on the dresser reads 3:32 a.m. I push myself up, sleep clinging, lulling me back.

“Jack.”

I pad across the hardwood floor. I find him in the living room, laptop open.

“What are you doing?” I ask, sitting beside him on the couch.

He drops an arm around me, pulls me in. I love the smell of him, the mingle of soap and—what? Just him, just his skin. No cologne. He’d wear the same three shirts and pairs of jeans all week if I didn’t buy his clothes. He doesn’t always shave, wears his hear longish, a sandy-blond tangle of curls. Has a pair of black-framed glasses instead of bothering with contact lenses.

“Just catching up on email.”

His email is open, but so is the web browser, the window hidden.

“What is it?” I tease. “Porn?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m out here watching porn while my beautiful wife sleeps in the next room.”

I nudge in closer, wrap my arms around him.

“Porn’s easier, though, right?” I offer reasonably. “Isn’t that what they say? Porn’s never tired, doesn’t say no. You don’t have to satisfy porn.”

“Stop,” he says. I reach for the computer and open the web browser before he can stop me. The face of a beautiful dark-eyed woman stares back at me. But it isn’t porn; just a news article he’s been reading. A photojournalist was beaten to death in her East Village apartment, a suspected robbery gone wrong, all her equipment stolen.

“Who is she?” I ask.

He shakes his head, a beat passing before he answers. “Just someone I used to know.”

I scan the article. “She was murdered?”

He stays silent.

I feel a rush of urgency. “Jack, tell me who this is and why you’re reading about it in the middle of the night.”

He doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead.

“Jack,” I say again. “Who is she?”

* * *

I wake up with a jolt on the stiff fabric of my couch, disoriented, reaching for him. The dream lingers, clings to my cells. Who is she? My own voice sounds back to me. I’m tangled in that strange weaving of the real, the remembered and the imagined. Jack’s scent, the feel of his arm, stays even as the shapes and shadows of the apartment he’s never seen assert themselves into my consciousness.

I reach for the dream—the woman’s face on the screen, the news article. Someone I used to know. But it’s jumbled, makes no sense. A dream? A memory? Some weird hybrid?

The couch beneath me is hard, not soft and saggy like the one in our old place. This one I bought online because I thought it looked sleek and stylish; when it arrived, it was as stiff and gray as a concrete slab. I didn’t have the energy to return it.

The television is on, the sound down so low it’s barely audible. Radar images of tomorrow’s weather swirl red and orange, a storm brewing, unseasonable heat.

Slowly, Jack, the dream begin to fade. I reach for him, but he’s sand through my fingers.

This is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.

And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.

I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.

It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.

It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?

Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.

I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.

What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.

Or...

I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?

To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.

With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?

The pen feels so heavy in my hand.

There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.

5

The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.

Where am I? I should know this.

I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.

You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.

I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.

Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?

Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s funeral. I can hear her throaty laugh, inappropriate enough to draw eyes. Me wishing for the millionth time that my father was still alive. Daddy, please. I need you. How silly. A grown woman still calling for her father. Those are the last things I can remember. Where am I now? How did I get here?

I pull myself unsteadily to standing, the walls spinning. Someone pounds on the stall door.

“One minute,” I say, voice croaky and strange. I don’t even sound like myself.

Whoever it is finds another stall, slams the door. The door outside swings open, voices and music pour in, filling the whole room. Then it goes quiet again.

There’s a bag lying beside me, a glittery black evening purse. Even though I don’t recognize it, I grab for it and open it. My cell phone, dead. Five hundred dollars in cash. A thick compact, which I pry open with shaking hands.

The woman in the mirror is a mess, long black hair wild, mascara running down her face in sad clown tears, pale, blue eyes wide with fright. I sit on the seat and use some toilet paper and my own spit to clean my face. I do a passable job, running my fingers through my hair, using the makeup in my bag to fix myself up. In the small shaking mirror, I’m almost normal again. Except for the fact that I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.

Okay. Deal with that later. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I just need to get myself home. I can figure everything out once I’m safe. I’ll call Layla then. We’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.

I wobble through the stall door, tilting in heels too high. Two women—one black, one white—applying makeup at the mirror glance at me, then at each other. They both start to laugh.

“You okay, honey?” one of them asks, not really caring. She smears a garish red to her lips.

“You need to Uber your ass home, girl,” says the other, frowning in disapproval. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, her lips dazzling berry. I feel a lash of anger, but a wash of shame keeps me from answering back.

Their laughter follows me out the door, until it’s drowned out by the heavy techno beat. Bodies throb on the dance floor as I push my way through the crowd, wondering where the exit is. Instead, I find myself at the bar, taking a seat. I’ll rest here a minute, my legs so unsteady, head spinning.

The bartender comes over and leans in to me. She brings me a glass of ice water. Embossed in ornate script on the glass, a word in red: Morpheus.

“Your boyfriend’s been waiting for you all this time,” she says as I take a long swallow. “If you thought you lost him, you didn’t.”

I glance in the direction that her eyes drift—they are violet, eerie and strange. Color contacts. On her arms, tattoos—a dragon, a tower, a woman dancing. I stare, fixated by the lines and colors. I can’t focus on anything for very long.

“He sees you.”

Who is he? Long sandy hair, pulled back, a thick jaw and strange eyes that seem to defy colors—amber, green or steely blue. He gets up and comes over, leans in behind me.

“I thought you left.” His voice in my ear sends a shiver down my spine.

He spins me around, tugs me into him. The heat between us; it’s electric. He snakes one arm around my back, the other around my neck and leans in, as if we are not in a crowded club, but alone. His draw is magnetic, irresistible. And then we are alone, the world dropping away, music fading, as he kisses me long and deep. I am on fire with desire, a deep ache inside me. It’s embarrassing how badly I want him.

Jack. Jack.

But it’s not Jack.

“Who is Jack?” he wants to know. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be Jack, whoever he is. I’ll be anyone you want me to be.”

Then, as if by magic, we are in his car—or at least he’s driving. I have no idea whose car it is. But it’s a nice one, leather, glowing blue lights, soft music playing on Bose speakers. Everything smells clean, new. The city skyline is in the rearview mirror, streamers of white and red lights around us.

“Where are we going?” I ask, barely even recognizing my own voice.

“Don’t you remember?” he asks gently.

“No,” I say with a rising panic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.”

He looks at me with a strange smile and just keeps driving.

6

I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.

The words burrow into my sleep, taking on urgency, growing louder, until the sound of my own frightened shout wakes me.

I bolt upright, breath labored, T-shirt soaked through with sweat. I’m in my own bed, the covers tossed to the floor. A weak Tuesday morning sun bleeds in through the blinds, shining on my clothes from last night in a messy tumble on the floor.