My Darling Husband(50)
“Hang on, Tanya,” I shout, pointing my face into the hallway. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right there.”
My words don’t stop her footsteps from moving deeper into the house. Tanya is our nosiest neighbor, the kind who parks herself in her bay window when the kids are at school so she can keep an eye on the street. She knows every neighbor within a five-mile radius. She knows their kids’ names and their dogs’ names and what day their lawn and pool service comes. She knows who’s pregnant and who’s getting married or on the verge of divorce, and which houses are about to go on the market weeks before the broker hammers a For Sale sign in the grass. If one of our neighbors forgets to pick up their dog’s shit from our front yard, Tanya calls to tell me who it was, and exactly which bush it’s under. She is a one-woman security patrol, and she drives Cam and me up a tree.
And now she’s here, in our house. Standing in the foyer. If she comes in any farther, and she will, which way will she go? Left, into the kitchen and the television room beyond? Or right for the stairs—in full view of us, standing just inside the bedroom doorway.
And speaking of bedrooms, it feels strange to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a masked man in mine. The space is too personal and far too intimate. Everywhere I look are pieces of me and Cam. The framed photos of the kids, naked but for their diapers, on the wall. The romance novels piled up on a nightstand strewn with discarded earrings and Chapstick and lotion bottles. The neat pile of freshly laundered sports bras on the bed, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer. I don’t want to be here with him. It’s too disturbing, like some kind of BDSM nightmare.
On the other side of the wall, Tanya’s footsteps go dull and blunted, which means she’s moved from the foyer marble onto the living room hardwood.
Please go left please go left.
Turning right would get us killed. Me, Baxter, Tanya. Three unarmed innocents. Turning right would involve her in this nightmare, too.
And then something else occurs to me. What if she’s here because she saw Beatrix make her escape? What if she saw her...I don’t know, shimmy down a drainpipe, race down the hill, sneak through the bushes to the neighbors’? If anybody saw Beatrix make a run for it, it would have been Tanya. What if that’s what she’s coming here to tell me?
Tanya’s footsteps are clomping around, moving nearer. “Where are y’all? Are you upstairs?”
“Get rid of her,” the man whispers, and now he sounds like Cam. Cam has never been a Tanya fan. Not since the welcome-to-the-neighborhood party she threw us, where after one too many cocktails, I offered her a key. Cam wanted me to march over there and demand it back, because he knew she’d equate the key with an open-door policy. She uses it at least once a week to pop over for drinks, to deliver our mail or just to say hi. She’s sweet, but she needs constant coddling, like an insecure, jealous spouse. She wants nothing more than to be needed.
And now that’s one battle won because boy do I ever need her.
I scurry down the hall with Baxter on my hip, my shoes slipping in the broken glass, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. I spot Tanya in the living room, pinching a fuchsia-tipped bloom of an orchid plant between two fingers, I’m guessing to see if it’s real.
“Sorry, sorry. We were in the bedroom. Hey, Tan.”
She whirls around, her oversize shirt swinging around her hips, and I know what she sees: wild hair, lipstick chewed off, haunted eyes. I saw myself in the bedroom mirror just now. I know I look a mess.
But Tanya is her usual put-together self. Dark jeans, white shirt topped with a chunky necklace. This one’s made of long fingers of polished black horn studded with diamonds. Tanya once told me she knew every time her ex-husband had an affair, because he’d come home with another stunner for her jewelry collection—and she has amassed quite the collection.
“There you are. I was just bringing by some mail I picked up for you last week. Y’all should really put a lock on that mailbox, it’s a surefire way to—Aww, Baxie, what’s the matter, sugar? You look like you’ve been crying.” She steps close enough to brush his cheek with the pad of her thumb.
One more inch, one tiny twist of her head, and she’ll spot the masked man slinking silently down the hall to my right, the gun he’s aiming at my temple.
“He’s just tired. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”
Her glossed lips purse with sympathy. “Poor baby. I hope you’re not coming down with that nasty bug that’s been working its way through the club.” She presses the back of her hand to Baxter’s forehead, then one of his cheeks. “You’re a little warm, but nothing too bad. Are you feeling okay?”
She’s standing less than a foot away, close enough I can smell her spicy-sweet perfume and the caramel she stirred into her afternoon coffee.
“Baxter’s fine.” I run a shaky hand over Baxter’s head, flattening the tangle of fine hair at the crown. My next words are as much for him as they are for me: “He’s fine. Everybody’s fine.”
She smiles, but I can’t manage to match it.
“Well, you can never be too careful, you know, and you don’t want to push too hard if you’re not feeling well. Bill McAllister tried that, and he passed out on the ninth tee. One minute he’s standing there, bragging to his caddie about the birdie he just scored, the next he’s lights out on the green. They carted him off in an ambulance, you know.”