Bad Mommy(55)

“You’re going to just pretend like you didn’t see me?”

I turned to see Fig with her own cart, already loaded with bags. I thought she was joking, but there was no smile on her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup and her hair was stringy like it hadn’t been washed in days.

“I see you now,” I said, smiling. “Hello.”

Her eyes were focused on Darius. I glanced at him over my shoulder, my paper Starbucks cup clasped in my hand. Had he seen her and not acknowledged her?

“You saw me,” she said. “And you pretended you didn’t.”

Now she was looking at me. “I didn’t see you. I’m sorry.” I turned back to Darius. “Did you see her?”

He was putting bags in our cart, not looking up.

“Darius…?”

He shook his head.

When I turned back to Fig she was gone, an empty space in front of me. I glanced toward the doors just in time to see her disappear.

“What the hell?” I said.

“She’s crazy.” He frowned.

I trotted after him as he pushed the cart from the store.

“Did you see her?“

“No,” he said, firmly. “I absolutely did not.”

“Why would she do that? Are you guys fighting?”

“No,” he said, again.

“Darius! Stop!”

We were in the middle of the street, but he stopped.

“What the fuck happened back there?”

“Look, I can’t explain the actions of a mad woman. You’ll have to ask her. She’s a loose cannon, that’s all I know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Guess so…”

I kept turning it over in my mind. The words, the small history I collected from her, the opinions of other people. It was a lot to consider. At first I thought I saw agony in her eyes. She loved Plath, said she related to her. Who related to Plath but the manic-depressives? The suicidal? There was no real agony, I realized. It was all self-inflicted. Suffering made her feel important. All of her wounds were carefully rehearsed, much like her personality. She gave plastic flowers. So real and brilliant in color you almost believed the lie. But, she took little things, thefts that were so small you hardly noticed: a cause, or a playlist—something that would give her something to bond with you about. It’s not like I didn’t see the patterns. Everyone thought I didn’t see. But, I did and I wanted to watch. That’s what writers do—the good ones anyway—we watched and we learned the faux pas of human nature. The delicate ways people came undone, the tiny little frays in the tapestry. Fig acted delicate. Her headaches, for example, she always got them when Darius was around. We could have been laughing and carrying on ten minutes before, and the minute Darius walked through the front door her face would become sour … pained, like she’d been stabbed through the temple with a butter knife. Darius wouldn’t notice, but I’d mention it to him later.

“Seriously?” he’d say. “Why do you think she does that?”

“You’re the shrink.”

He stroked his face and then said, “It’s her thing. She plays vulnerable for attention.”

“It works.”

“You have to be careful with what you tell her,” said Darius with a frown. “She-”

“She what?” I snapped then almost immediately regretted it. He was trying to help. I was always so hard on him. He was also a shrink. If he thought that Fig was taking everything I said too far, then she probably was. I thought about all the things I’d told her about Ryan and flinched. Was she pushing me toward Ryan because she wanted Darius? I’d seen the way she looked at him, the way she tried to create a divide between us whenever we were all together. Sometimes we’d play board games, and even with her guy there, Fig would somehow end up on a team with Darius, the two of them hunkering down on the other side of the table together, plotting their strategy. I thought it was cute at first. They shared humor, and movie quotes, and sarcasm. It was almost a relief at first to not have to pretend those things with Darius, scrounge around in my brain for a movie quote to match his movie quote. The bantering came easy for them. If I wanted to feel a connection to Darius I had to come to his level. He had no clue how to get to mine. She was quite the pro at setting up emotional teams and then rallying her players against me. A real smooth gamer. Up until now it had mostly annoyed me, but seeing her behavior in a new light—in Darius’s light—made me feel sick to my stomach. We’d once had dinner with Amanda and Hollis and I’d been the butt of her jokes—she’d even had Darius laughing—until Amanda had caught my eye from across the table and changed the subject. After dinner she’d grabbed me by the arm and whispered, “What the fuck?” in my ear.

Later at home, I thought back to the first day we’d met Fig. The day she’d spoken to Mercy in the garden, a completely different person, overweight with limp blonde hair—eager, so eager in everything she did. I’d invited her into my home because of something I’d seen in her eyes.

As soon as Darius passed out on the couch, per usual, I called Amanda.

“Jo, I told you from the beginning that something was up with her. She’s strangely obsessed with you. Even Darius thinks that.”

“Yeah,” I said, weakly. “I just figured she needed a friend, you know…” I heard myself making excuses for her and scrunched up my nose.