The Herd(30)

First things first: I fished my phone out of my pocket, ignoring all the new-message alerts, and performed the same series of searches I did every few months—Google, then a handful of apps, the series of memorized usernames, tapping on tagged locations to be sure. Nowhere near NYC. I set my phone down and exhaled.

My gaze fell on my bag, crumpled on the floor just inside the door. I blinked at it and got the eerie sensation that the object inside was staring back at me. Waiting quietly, like a grenade with the pin yanked out.

I crawled over to it and sat, pulling the satchel onto my lap. It had all happened so quickly. The doorbell had chimed, and everyone had tumbled downstairs after it. Alone in the room, I’d let instincts take over—lunging over to Eleanor’s bed, to the side I assumed was hers thanks to the presence of La Mer hand cream and a worn bell hooks book. I slipped my hand under the white duvet, feeling dirty, feeling an instant urge to apologize to the bed for reaching inside. I forced my hand into the crease between the box spring and the mattress and felt it: a crisp corner, stiffness where only softness belonged. My whole arm had buzzed as I ripped the object out and flung it into my bag just as my phone began to ring, and I’d answered while pummeling down the stairs, grateful for the excuse for my tardiness.

Now, heart pounding, I turned the envelope over in my hands: nothing on the outside, the edges a little worn from use. I slid a finger under the flap and then paused.

Eleanor and I had been talking about chores, the household chores we hate. How long ago had that been? Two months, maybe three? It’d been a conversation like any other, banal thoughts rolling around like marbles on a tray when we crossed paths at the Herd’s café. I’d mentioned I was debating hiring a cleaning lady, and she’d told me about her own hire but used the much more gender-neutral term “housekeeper,” which touched off a jolt of embarrassment. She’d reported that she loved hers but had to ask her to stop folding the laundry because Eleanor liked doing it herself, which I found downright nuts. I’d pointed out I’d love a housekeeper (yes, a housekeeper) to make the bed after laundry day, a step I dreaded, and Eleanor had grinned. I asked her not to strip the bed or make it, either, but that’s just because I store my secrets there. Her eyes sparkled. It’s where I kept my diary growing up, so my mom wouldn’t find it. Old habits die hard, I guess. I’d giggled and bantered back that that was a perk of living alone—my secrets lived almost out in the open, the gratitude journal and expensive vibrator chilling in an unlocked drawer to the right of my bed.

I’d forgotten about it altogether until we ran upstairs tonight, my and Mikki’s and Katie’s feet a stampede on the wooden stairs, and saw Daniel crouched in front of Eleanor’s desk, feeding a key into a locked drawer. So this was a hiding place, a shared one, for secrets between the two of them, but back in the bedroom…

I flicked the envelope open. Inside was a Post-it stuck to a scrap of computer paper, torn from a corner. Both papers had strings of numbers written on them: 527434340100 on the purple Post-it, 8914512191 on the scrap. They were in the same handwriting—block numbers, not Eleanor’s.

I tapped them out on my fingers and noticed that while the first was too long, the second might be a phone number. I tried it: a jazzy little riff, then, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.” I Googled both numbers; no hits.

Passwords? I pulled out my wallet and confirmed that both strings of numbers were too short to be credit card or bank account numbers. Again, I tapped my fingers against my lap as I recited my Social Security number—also nine. What the hell were these, and why were they tucked in an envelope in Eleanor’s bed? I couldn’t believe I’d taken these. Thank God no one had noticed in the hubbub.

I stood clumsily and made my way into the living room. Cosmo watched me from the back of the couch, his front paws curled underneath him. I flopped down and pulled him onto my stomach; he thought about it for a second, then knotted himself into a circle. Texts and email alerts kept rattling my phone against the hardwood floor twenty feet away.

Had Ratliff and Herrera contacted Cameron yet? It was strange to picture them calling him; he felt like someone from another lifetime, a world that didn’t Venn-diagram with ours. It’d all been rather sweet: Eleanor’s childhood home was down the street from Ted and Cameron’s, and while Ted and Eleanor had been friends practically since birth, in high school she’d begun dating Cameron—one year older and still living at home while he went to community college. She’d implied his decision not to head farther afield for school was about wanting to be near her—and so he hadn’t been pleased when, the summer before her freshman year at Harvard, she told him it was time to see other people.

A week or two into freshman year, as we ate late-night pizza and talked breathlessly about our (nearly nonexistent) sex lives, Mikki and I had forced Eleanor to show us photos of her high-school-boyfriend-slash-recent-ex. We were not particularly surprised to see that he was hot, with bright-blue eyes and Rumi quotes tattooed on his arms and the tousled hair of a wannabe surfer.

Cameron’s photos, in fact, left us overly excited to meet his little brother, Ted. But we quickly discovered the younger Corrigan was gawky and thin, all elbows and ears and 20,000 leagues below Eleanor. Ted was just starting at Boston University, and he would occasionally take the bus over to Harvard. It was pretty obvious that Ted had a puppy-dog crush on Eleanor, but they both ignored it and got along spectacularly as old friends. He brought us greasy boxes from Union Square Donuts (a.m.) or pizza from Pinocchio’s (p.m.) and made us all smile with his unintimidating goofiness. Still, Cameron remained a mystery to Mikki and me.