No One Will Miss Her(50)

And I know how it looks: like we planned it, Dwayne and I, to kill the rich couple and run away with their money. It looks like I got close to Adrienne, pretending to be her friend, learning her tics and her accent and her smartphone pass code, just so that I could steal her identity after I shot her in the face. I even figured out how to make myself look more like her, mimicking the way she styled her hair and overlined her lips to make them look bigger. But Christ, it’s not because I wanted her dead. It’s because I wanted her life. And didn’t I tell you I was always good at pretending? It was so easy to imagine myself slipping out of my sad little existence and into hers. I could see so clearly how it was possible. Have you ever seen one of those movies where the grubby girl takes off her glasses, and plucks her eyebrows, and poof, she’s magically transformed from a mousy nobody into somebody worth looking at? That was us, me and Adrienne. She was the after; I was the before.

Dwayne laughed in my face the first time I said it, in an unguarded moment during that first summer, after I’d delivered their first round of groceries. The words just came out of my mouth—“Don’t you think we look a little bit alike?”—and he laughed so hard that he started to choke, while I stared at the floor and felt my cheeks flush crimson.

“In your dreams,” he said. “Maybe after a million bucks of plastic surgery.”

But it didn’t take a million. Not even close. I know the exact dollar amount it took to erase the one significant difference between me and Adrienne Richards: five hundred. That was the cost of the injection that filled in the hollows under my eyes, the lines on my forehead, and the funniest part is that she’s the one who told me I should do it. I can still hear her voice, never more syrupy sweet than when she was insulting you in the guise of a compliment: Girl, I’ve been getting preventative Botox for ages. I wish I could be more like you, and just not care what I look like. Those under-eye bags would drive me crazy. They can fix that, you know.

I did it just after Christmas, while Dwayne was making his one and only half-assed attempt at getting clean. He’d found a short-term facility in Bangor, a five-day detox; he told people he was going away on a hunting trip so that his mom wouldn’t find out the truth. I did my part, following him in my car to the rehab, staying long enough to make sure he went in. But instead of turning around and going home, I kept on driving, down the coast, until I found a chic little town I’d read about on some travel website, where rich lady tourists would go with their friends for “girls’ weekends”—strolling galleries, tasting wines, and pumping their faces full of filler before sleeping it all off at a seaside bed-and-breakfast. I spent the night there in the only place that stayed open during the off-season, walking along the sweet little streets where most of the shops and galleries were closed for the winter, pretending to be someone else. And the next morning, before I left, I used some of the money I’d made from renting to Adrienne Richards to make myself look just a little more like her. The way I might have looked if I had been born a few hundred miles away, if I’d been someone else’s daughter. The way I might have looked if I weren’t married to a junkie—who, by the way, had already bailed out of rehab after less than twenty-four hours, and was at that very moment cruising through a strange city, looking for a needle of his own. If I’d known that Dwayne had already relapsed, I might have told the guy with the syringe to forget it. But I didn’t, and I’m glad. The injections erased a decade of worry, pain, and bad decisions from my face overnight. Botox in the angry frown line between my eyebrows, filler in the bags beneath. The guy was a dentist, of all things. I didn’t care; he was cheaper than the fancy medical spas, set up in a little strip mall on the outskirts of town. He even bleached my teeth after, for free.

Nobody ever noticed, of course. When you see the same faces every day, year in, year out, there comes a point where it’s all so familiar that you stop noticing what they look like. Like a long-married couple who are so close, for so long, that they never notice all the ways that time is slowly leaving its mark on the other person’s face. Certainly nobody was looking at me closely enough to notice anything different—except Jennifer, and only because she saw the bruises a day later, when she showed up hovering outside my door with the roasting pan I’d forgotten I let her borrow. We never had it out or even talked about that little incident at the barbecue, and she was always nervous around me, like she thought I might start screaming or hitting her or both. I never bothered to explain to her that I didn’t have the energy to stay angry. Catching my husband getting jerked off on the toilet by the local hairdresser seemed almost poetic, just another little reminder from fate or God or whoever that things could, and would, always get worse. And I’ll tell you what: I’ll bet she feels bad now. She probably thought Dwayne was hitting me. Isn’t that rich? I almost wish he had. Not because I deserved it, but because maybe if he did, I would have left.

The truth is, I never meant to kill her. You probably don’t believe me, and I probably wouldn’t believe me, either. But the kind of coveting I did, it wasn’t about her at all. It was about me, about the crazy fantasy of disentangling myself from my shitty marriage, my shitty everything, a lifetime of false starts and missed chances and squandered potential, never amounting to anything but a cautionary tale. I didn’t want to kill Adrienne. What would I have done without her? How could I live a better life if she wasn’t there to show me what “better” looked like? She inspired me. Every time I looked at her, it became a little bit more possible to imagine that it wasn’t too late after all, that I could still become someone else. I imagined myself speeding out of town in a big, black car with a driver up front, sipping champagne in the back seat—or maybe driving myself, in a cream-colored convertible with the top down. I imagined torching the junkyard as I left, a Molotov cocktail tossed out the window as I sped by, blowing a kiss to the spreading flames as they grew bigger and brighter in my rearview mirror. Destroying my father’s last tie to this piece-of-shit town, in the hopes that he’d finally leave, too. I paid that dentist with the needle to show me a glimpse of another life, to make me look the way I might’ve looked if I’d made different goddamn choices. If I’d married rich, into the kind of money that forms a cushiony layer between you and the world, so soft and thick that nothing can touch you hard enough to leave a mark. Adrienne was five years older than me, but I was the one with the tired eyes and two unhappy furrows already beginning to form between my brows.