The Turnout(84)

“Why were you still giving him money?”

She took a long sip. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Was he blackmailing you?”

First, Mrs. Bloom smirked a little. Then she sat very still, setting her highball glass on her knee, a new water ring forming on her wool pants.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said at last, nearly a whisper, even though they appeared to be alone in the house. “So ashamed.”

Dara felt pinpricks on her neck, her wrists, her hips. Something was happening.

“Did you know about the wife?”

Mrs. Bloom looked up.

“That,” she said slowly, carefully, “was the hardest part.”

“Because he didn’t tell you.”

“No, because I knew her first.”



* * *



*

It had begun nearly two years ago. She’d been having these migraines ever since Bailey was born. So bad she’d vomit, so bad she couldn’t open her eyes for days. A friend recommended acupuncture. She found a woman she liked at a medical spa, a little place inside that big glass building by the highway.

“And this was her?” Dara said. “His wife?”

Mrs. Bloom nodded. “She understood my body so well. By the end of the first session, my body felt like liquid. My head felt clear and strong. Then she told me about this special bathtub that would help. Her husband could install it. I’d been thinking of a renovation anyway, so I hired him.”

Mrs. Bloom took a long sip from that rattling glass, leaning back, her lipstick slightly smudged.

“But then, one day, weeks into the renovation, she shows up at my front door. In her scrubs. She looked like she’d been crying for hours. She’d found some things on his phone . . . some texts, some . . . photos. Things he promised me he wouldn’t keep.”

There it was. There it was. Mrs. Bloom and Derek, the furtive sex, the bleached hair, the ensnarement, the money, the manipulation, the trap.

“What did you say to her? The wife?”

“I denied it. But it was all there.” Mrs. Bloom’s face reddened, even at the memory. “But then she just started begging me. Telling me how she needed him. They were deep in debt, about to lose their house. She had to hide her car in a coworker’s garage so they wouldn’t repossess it. And then she started talking about the children.”

“Children?” Dara felt the cold of her glass in her hand. She took another sip, feeling the fire again. There was always something new now. Something new and incredible.

“Four. One with some kind of . . . problem. It was all so terrible. I needed her to leave. I ended up writing her a check.”

“Why?”

“I would have given her anything,” Mrs. Bloom said. “Anything.”

“That’s when you ended it?”

Mrs. Bloom looked at her like Dara hadn’t been listening at all.



* * *



*

They were moving soundlessly up the carpeted stairs.

“You need to see it,” Mrs. Bloom kept murmuring as Dara hurried behind her, up the stairs and down a long hallway, “to understand.”

The pocket door slid open soundlessly. Inside, the walls, the carpet, the towels, were all dark pink and strongly scented, such that it was like stepping into the center of a blooming rose.

“I never come in here anymore,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

It was Mrs. Bloom’s master bathroom—the one they’d heard about. The contractor’s dazzling work. Imagine what he could do for you!

Everything looked new and shiny. All the fixtures and hardware, like the cellophane hadn’t yet been pulled off. The walk-in shower with gold taps and jets studded up and down like fat jewels. A vessel sink suited for Cleopatra. Gold-plated towel warmers thick with white swaddlers. A cream-white tub shaped like an elegant slipper, curved low in the center, its ends dipping upward like a pointe shoe turned on its side.

It made her think of their mother’s claw-footer, rust rings around its faucets, sides coated with lime. The only bath she’d ever known, her whole life.

“This is what he did,” Mrs. Bloom said. “Derek.”

It was like a little girl’s fantasy of a bathroom, Dara thought. Like she herself imagined as a child, bubble baths and fur rugs to wiggle your toes in.

It made her think of Derek that first day, promising a ballerina palace.

. . . why not dream bigger? I can give you all the things you want.

“Take off your shoes,” Mrs. Bloom said, her hands dancing along a control board on the rose-colored wall.

Dara would just as soon spread her legs as show her bare feet to this woman, not a dancer, and in this bathroom—his creation.

“You want to understand,” Mrs. Bloom said, her tone harder, steely, an insistent mother doling out a lesson. “You want to know why, how. So take off your shoes.”

Dara slid off her boots slowly, her toes like overripe cherries on the white carpet.

“Feel that?” Mrs. Bloom said.

And suddenly Dara felt something tickling the bottoms of her feet, even through her cowhide-thick skin. The carpet was humming warmly, tickling along her arches.

“Radiant heat,” Mrs. Bloom said. “He insisted.”