Her Perfect Life Read online

  “Even if she had known, there isn’t any way that was the reason.”

  Simon snapped his head sideways to look at her, his surprise obvious. He had been expecting Eileen, Clare’s sister, to rip him apart after admitting something so awful. “How do you know? Did you speak to her? Do you know something?” His desperate need for absolution was obvious.

  “No, not recently.”

  “Then how can you be so sure? I’ve been over it a thousand times in my head, trying to figure out if there was any way she might have found out. I just don’t see how it was possible. I was so careful.”

  This did make her mad, but not for the reasons it should. “Oh, because that’s the most worrisome and important part? That there was no way you could have been stupid enough to get caught?” She was imagining her own husband now—a husband that was loved by his wife—a wife that was devastated by the betrayal.

  “Eileen…no, I—”

  “No, of course not.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Because you loved her, right? Clare, that is, not whoever your fucking piece of side ass was?” She was on a runaway collision with the truth now. She couldn’t even feel the brakes.

  “You want to know the truth, Simon? How do I know Clare didn’t kill herself over you? Because she never fucking loved you in the first place. Not the first day she met you, not the second she saw you in that crappy bar in Brooklyn, not the day she moved in with you, not the moment she fucking married you, not even on the day she stood on this goddamn beach and blew her own heart out of her chest. So that’s how I know, for sure, that even if she had been handed an envelope filled with pictures of you fucking Lauren Andrews, it wouldn’t have made one damn bit of difference to her!”

  Eileen stood up, grabbed the empty bottle from the sand, pulled her arm back, and flung it as far as she could into the approaching surf before storming through the loose sand to the stairs leading back up the cliff to her sister’s mansion above.

  Her bare foot had barely touched the third stair when she felt a tight grip on her forearm. “Eileen!” Simon said. “Stop.”

  Still seething, but already realizing it wasn’t Simon she was enraged with but her own husband, she turned and faced him.

  “What are you talking about?” he begged her. “Please,” he sobbed. “Please talk to me. I feel like I’m losing my mind. What do you mean—she never loved me?”

  Simon stared up at her, waiting for some answers.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that. A lot of that was not even about you, or Clare. I’m sorry, Simon.”

  “But what you said, about how she felt…what about that?”

  She considered lying to him, or rather, allowing him to continue to believe whatever it was he had always believed about her sister and the relationship he had with her. It might have been kinder—except now Simon also believed that it was possible that Clare would ever take her own life because of something he had done. Whatever he had done, no matter how many women Simon slept with—Eileen knew Simon didn’t deserve to lug around the degree of guilt he was so obviously floundering under.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she said, pulling her arm from his desperate grasp. “Let’s talk up at the house.”

  “But you know something? You think you know why she did it?” he questioned her as they climbed the stairs together.

  “No, but Clare was complex, often hard to understand. It occurs to me that we both knew things about my sister, maybe very different things. We should talk about her, together, and see if there is some way to make sense of all this.”

  They climbed several more steps in silence, the exertion making Eileen’s heart pound uncomfortably in her chest.

  “Who is Lauren Andrews?” Simon suddenly asked.

  Eileen’s shoulders sagged, but she managed to keep marching up the seemingly endless stairs. “She’s nothing to do with Clare, but maybe that’s something else we can talk about.” For several more steps, she considered exposing that very hurtful and embarrassing information to her brother-in-law. “In fact, I think I might really need to.”

  Back inside the house, Simon went to his room first and changed into dry clothes before he met her in Clare’s study. Eileen watched Simon stand near the door and take in Clare’s presence, her style, her things, her work, her memories. “It hurts to even be in here,” he said before moving closer and joining Eileen on the couch.

  She opened the other bottle of wine, her mother’s birth year, and filled both glasses she’d grabbed from the kitchen on her way. Simon noticed the open journal she had been reading earlier and raised his eyebrows.

  Eileen took a sip from her glass and explained her reasoning for not feeling guilty. “If my sister is going to take her life with zero explanation, then I figure that gives me the right to search for one.”

  Simon turned to the first page and read a few lines before looking up at Eileen. “It feels wrong. Like a violation of her trust.”

  “I felt that too, at first. You’ll get over it. Look, she spent her whole life filling those books. There has to be an answer in there…somewhere.”

  “You’ve read more than this?” He held the slim volume up like evidence.

  Eileen nodded.

  Simon reached for his glass and took a drink. “So what do we do? Just go through all her things? All her work? All her private thoughts?” He sounded incredulous, like he expected her to confirm how wrong that would be.

  “We could start there,” Eileen said, ignoring the uneasy expression on Simon’s face. “But first, maybe we could just talk about her, about the Clare each of us knew. Fill each other in?”

  “She would lose her mind if she knew we were even in here without her. Going through her things.”

  “Simon.” Eileen reached across the couch and placed her hand on his. “She’s gone. And maybe you don’t need this, but I do. And if the only way is by raking through every word she left behind, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  He looked down at the journal on his lap, then nodded. “What did you mean, when you said Clare never loved me?”

  Eileen took a sip and considered how best to proceed. “I understand this may be hurtful, and that is not my intention, not even close. But…” She sighed and gathered the will to continue. “Clare cared for you, and even told me once that if she were capable of experiencing love like that again, she believed you would be exactly the sort of person she would love. Which is why she married you. But something died in Clare…” Clare’s recent book, A Perfect Life, was sitting on the table in front of them. Eileen leaned forward, grabbed it, and quickly flipped to the dedication page. She pointed to the words on the page.

  For the love of my life.

  Finally, our painful truth.

  “This right here,” she said and looked up into Simon’s eyes. “Do you know what this means? What is the painful truth in this book that she’s referring to?”

  He stared at the words for several seconds. Eileen watched him closely, his eyes moving through Clare’s dedication several times. “When the book released, that surprised me,” he admitted. “It wasn’t what was in the final draft sent to her editor. When I called them and asked about it, they said Clare had made the last-minute change and requested they not loop me in. Honestly, I’ve read that book probably ten times through all the revisions, and again since her death… I can’t figure out what she’s pointing to.” He raised his eyes to Eileen’s. “If I’m being completely honest, I don’t recognize that story as having anything at all to do with our life. I see Clare in it, clearly, but if this book is supposed to be about us, our life, our marriage?” He shrugged. “I can’t piece it together.”

  Eileen closed the cover of the book and held it in her lap. “I don’t think it’s about you.”

  “But I’m her husband,” he protested.

  “But you weren’t the love of h
er life.”

  Simon’s face darkened as several thoughts and hurtful possibilities competed for attention in his head. “You think she was also having an affair?”

  Eileen shook her head. “No. I don’t think Clare would do that. I don’t think there would have been any point in something like that for her.”

  “Well, what then? Or rather, who?” He pulled the book from Eileen and opened it back up to Clare’s final dedication. “If it’s not about me, her husband, who was the love of her life?”

  “Adam Collins.”

  Simon looked confused. “Her friend…from high school?”

  Eileen sat back, wide-eyed and stunned. She stared at her brother-in-law and considered exactly what his question meant. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean exactly that. You think she dedicated this book to her dead friend?”

  Eileen shook her head. It wasn’t possible. Was it? Had Clare seriously never told Simon? Hidden it from him all these years? “He was her boyfriend,” Eileen breathed.

  “She never mentioned that.”

  Eileen felt the blood drain from her face. “He died in the accident…in high school?”

  “Yes, I remember she said something about that. They were good friends, and he had died in a car accident, or something. That was why she got that tattoo on her back. She said she got it done at a hole-in-the-wall place in Cheyenne, right after he died. She said they didn’t do a very good job. The whole thing was blurry, bleeding at the edges. I always assumed it was one of those impulsive things you do when you’re younger and end up regretting later.”

  He remembered something about that? “The car accident?” Eileen tried again. “She never told you…they were both in it, Adam and Clare.”

  Simon shook his head. “She never said that.”

  Eileen wracked her brain, trying to imagine how her sister had spent a life with this man and never shared any information about the most traumatic event in her life.

  Simon got up from the couch and walked to the plate-glass windows that reflected the light and images of the room back at them. He turned and looked around Clare’s office, from the ceiling to the floor. He stared at her bookcase, her artwork, and finally his eyes landed on her desk. In a few strides, Simon stood before Clare’s desk and reached behind her monitor. He held something in his hands, but with his back to her, Eileen couldn’t see what it was. He turned around and came back to the couch, holding the object in his hand out for Eileen to take. “Who is that with her?” he asked.

  Eileen took the small picture frame and looked at the young faces, smiling, so obviously in love. “It’s Adam.”

  “She took his last name.”

  “She did.”

  He sat back down on the couch and laced his fingers on top of his head, like he was trying to hold it together, his thoughts, everything he thought he knew, everything he now realized he didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry, Simon.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. I’m the one who didn’t…and she…how could I not know?” He unlaced his hands and reached for his glass on the table. He took a drink as he picked up Clare’s journal from the couch. “I want to know,” he said. “I don’t care what she would think. I need to know. Everything.”

  “I don’t know everything,” Eileen admitted. “Clare was mostly a mystery to me.”

  “To us both,” he corrected. “But we can piece together as much as we can.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I started already. Several of her old journals are in my room.”

  “What is this one about?” he asked, opening it back up to the first pages.

  “Brooklyn, when she first moved there, and her roommate, Donna Mehan. Who was Donna? That name is familiar for some reason. Maybe Clare mentioned her to me back then.”

  “Maybe, or maybe you remember her name from the New York Times bestseller list. She had a book a few years back, won the National Book Award. Everyone was reading it. Donna and Clare were roommates once upon a time. When I first met them, they were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other people.”

  “You knew Donna?”

  Simon nodded. “Technically, I still know her. I met both of them in a crappy little bar, the Blue Spruce, during an open mic night.”

  Chapter 22

  Clare

  Sixteen years before her death

  What did it mean? She couldn’t say for sure. Everything? Nothing at all? It was possible in this moment to believe both versions could be equally true. The Atlantic Monthly, it was no small thing and yet still utterly meaningless in the grander scope of worldwide accomplishments happening to thousands of other people right now. She hadn’t saved anyone’s life, crested Mount Everest, or even dug a well for an impoverished village somewhere in the middle of Africa. She had published a short story. That was all.

  But standing here, in the living room of the third-floor apartment she shared with Donna, Flynn, and Sergio, her two free copies still hidden inside the thin mailer, Clare allowed herself to feel the thrill, momentarily permitted a balloon of pride to swell in her chest. She had done it. She was now “published,” for God’s sake. It was real; the proof was in her hands.

  She kept her now-sweating hands from ripping the package open. She wanted to wait, take her time, savor this moment—absorb it fully. Because, even though she was right in the middle of it, on the swell of the accomplishment, the downslope from here was already cresting on her mental horizon.

  What if this was it? What if it never happened again? She could plainly see that was the emotion that immediately followed this wonderful moment, and because of that, in spite of it already casting an early shadow, she needed to draw this out a bit. Really taste it.

  No one else was home today, and that was a relief. She wanted this for herself, seeing the cover, opening to the table of contents, seeing her name and story title listed there. What would that feel like? After three years of trying, and almost a hundred rejections from editors all over the city, letters which she had piled up in three shoeboxes at the back of her closet, now, finally, one of her stories had found an editor who loved it at a publication she could be proud of.

  Donna would, quite simply, shit a brick when she found out. Never quite believing that it would ever actually happen, Clare hadn’t told Donna she’d finally landed an acceptance. She would show her tonight, the proof in her hands. All four of them would drink a good ten-dollar bottle of wine to celebrate. She would run down to their usual corner liquor store as soon as she had digested this realization for herself.

  She perched on the edge of their ripped and badly beaten couch. Someone, probably Flynn, had left their dirty plate and silverware on the coffee table. She reached for the knife, slid it through the envelope’s top crease, and pulled two copies out along with a handwritten note from the editor.

  Congratulations, Clare! Your first story. I’m confident it will eventually be only one of many! I will forever get to brag that I found you first. You have a beautiful and raw talent, and I hope to one day have the opportunity to work with you again.

  Sincerely, Emma

  She placed the letter carefully to the side and considered whether or not she should have it framed, decided that was silly, but then changed her mind yet again. She would want to remember this day, this feeling, this utter and complete sense of accomplishment in the very likely event that she never received a letter like this one again.

  The leading story in this month’s issue was something about fame and fantasy, the cost of it. It was written by the daughter of the famous psychologist Erik Erickson. Clare would read it—she would read everything in this issue, even every single advertisement. She wanted to digest every page of this magazine that had done something for her, to her—even if she wasn’t exactly sure what that something was yet. The cover for this issue was a cartoon of three famous men drawn large
in a too-small boat. Clare pushed past this to the table of contents page. There near the bottom, second from the last, was her title: Lost on the North Platte, Clare Collins.

  She turned to page sixty-two and spread the periodical open to her story, printed, being sold—being read. A sense of exposure, a raw vulnerability swept through her on a wave of embarrassment. She was grateful that she would never know what other people thought of her story after having read it. She considered not showing Donna after all, hiding this likely accident of luck from her. She was Clare’s harshest critic.

  “You need to toughen up,” Donna would say, often smiling while tossing Clare’s red-soaked pages back at her. “Do you think an editor is going to write you a love note? Should either one of us ever get published it will be after nearly drowning in a sea of red ink.”

  Clare looked down at the magazine in her hand, her story, her words. Anyone who really knew her would see through the fiction printed here to the truth—the truth that she obviously had not kept hidden. Beneath the changed names and slightly different plot events, this story was undeniably about her and Adam. How many people would be able to see that? Her mother and Eileen, yes. And maybe any one of her closer high school friends—Kaylee would know. Of course, how many of those people actually read the Atlantic Monthly? How many people in all of Casper? In all of Wyoming? The library might, might, have a subscription. Also, there was the fact that she published under her pseudonym—although taking Adam’s last name was hardly a Sherlock case to work out. Still, it was most likely that if she simply did not share, with anyone, that she had published this story, no one would ever know.

  Not even the people here in her New York life.

  Would I really prefer obscurity? Because what if she kept it secret? What if there was no celebration, no frame, no acknowledgment beyond this small moment here. Just her, her story, and two free copies. She would keep writing, like always. Having spent almost her whole life with a pen in her hand, stopping wasn’t something she could even imagine. But the publishing, this new thing, the exposure—she could stop that right now if she wanted. It was as simple as keeping all her words in her own journals. She didn’t have to share any of it, she realized.