Deceptive Innocence Read online

  Standing in front of my bed, staring down at several wardrobe choices I’ve laid out for myself, I want to pick wisely to set the tone for what’s next. Today will be my first day at work as Travis and Jessica Gable’s personal assistant, and dressing is a bit of a challenge. If I really want to get in with Jessica, I should wear something sweet, traditional, almost sarcastically feminine. Jessica herself always looks like she’s trying to channel Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face . . . except Audrey never looked so incredibly despondent.

  I sigh and push down the bubble of sympathy that keeps threatening to emerge. From the corner of my eye I watch a small cockroach scuttle across the floor, making sure it doesn’t come near me.

  We all live in our own individual hell. Some of us are just better at dealing with it.

  I turn back to the clothes. Travis’s tastes are . . . well, they’re different from his wife’s, but if I look like I’m dressing for him, she will become suspicious. Plus she’ll be reminded that in every way that counts I really work for her husband, not her.

  I don’t want to remind Jessica of that. Later, maybe, but not today. So I opt for a suit I scored at a consignment store on the “right” side of town. The color is what fashionistas would call burnt umber, and what I call reddish brown. The jacket drapes in front (just like the matching sleeveless shirt meant to be worn beneath it) and it nips at the waist and flares at the hips. The skirt is fitted just enough, and the hem hits the knee. Both Audrey and Jessica would approve. I’m sure Travis will appreciate it enough too.

  I dress, apply my makeup, and then stare into the full-length mirror. I cleaned the glass less than a week ago, but there is already a thin layer of dust on it and a few smudges that give my reflection a slightly hazy and warped quality. Still, I can see the rewards of my efforts. I’ve pulled back my hair into a tight, low bun, not all that dissimilar from how Jessica wears hers. The heels are sort of Mary Jane style.

  Cocking my head slightly, I study myself some more. “Is this me?” I ask aloud. For a second I feel the stab of anxiety. I’ve played so many parts . . . at what point does my real self disappear? I look down at my newly manicured fingernails. Not a single chip there.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I whisper.

  And it’s true. Who the hell cares who I was or who I am underneath all the polish and costumes? Who cares who I’m going to be when this is all over? My own life hasn’t meant much for some time. It didn’t mean much to the various foster families I boarded with, it didn’t matter to the people who locked up my mom, it never meant anything to my father, whoever the hell he is, and at a certain point it stopped meaning much to me. The thing that motivates me to get out of bed every day is revenge. I educated myself for the sake of revenge. I studied fashion, Shakespeare, tennis, finance, politics, commerce, art, and law—all for the sake of revenge. If it wasn’t for revenge, I wouldn’t have even bothered to do my nails. I wouldn’t bother to eat. I might have killed myself, but even that seemed like a wasted effort. Without revenge, my death would be as meaningless as my life. Which raises the question . . .

  What happens when it’s over?

  The question is always there, coiled up like a snake in the back of my mind, waiting to inject its venom into my thoughts. What happens after I win? Without revenge and vengeance—without war—what’s left of me?

  “Did it feel like you were winning when there was blood on your hands?”

  I close my eyes and take another deep breath.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say again. Because it doesn’t. It’s why I didn’t need Lander to wear a condom. I doubt Lander has anything, but at this point my future health isn’t all that important. If I stop . . . existing . . . after my victory . . . well, that’ll be all right. I’ll have fulfilled my purpose. I’m a soldier—my objective isn’t to preserve my own life. My objective is simply to win. That’s it.

  I open my eyes in time to see another cockroach. I raise my foot and stomp on it, crushing it under my heel.

  It doesn’t matter who I am underneath it all, not really.

  All that matters is that I’m ruthless.

  chapter thirteen

  When Jessica opens the door, she’s wearing a pale aqua-green sheath dress that hangs stiffly from her shoulders. It’s not tight . . . in fact on someone else it might be frumpy. But Twiggy-thin Jessica wears it well. My mother used to call women like her “human hangers.” Their figures are designed to make clothes look good, but it’s all silk and mirrors. Take their clothes off and there’s nothing there for a man to sink his teeth into. Nothing soft or feminine for him to hold on to. According to my mother, naked stick-skinny women have all the sex appeal of a paper doll.

  My mother never mentioned that Nick Foley’s wife was very skinny. She didn’t have to, I knew who she was thinking about.

  Jessica isn’t smiling as she stands in the doorway, blocking my entrance. But she doesn’t look angry either. She just looks kinda . . . spacey. “Are you early?”

  “Only ten minutes.” I check my watch to confirm. “Is that all right?”

  Jessica waves her hand in the air. I can’t tell if she’s making a dismissive gesture or practicing her princess wave.

  Then from the back of the penthouse I hear the laughter of children. It’s startling. It’s not that I forgot that Travis and Jessica have kids, it’s just that they’re both such terrible people it’s the kind of thing I didn’t want to remember.

  As the echoes of laughter come rolling down the hall, I find myself turning away from the sound.

  “Oh, my children weren’t here during your interview, were they?” Jessica’s voice sounds so hollow it has the quality of an echo. “Let’s meet the children.” She turns on her heel and leads me into the penthouse.

  In the living room, sitting in the armchair, there’s a woman in her early forties with olive skin and a mass of thick curly reddish-brown hair. She’s possibly Puerto Rican. Standing near her are a seven-year-old boy and a girl who’s not quite three. The boy is tossing a Nerf football into his sister’s waiting arms from about four feet away. Each time, she closes her arms a moment too late, letting the ball drop soundlessly to the floor, but each time, the girl is delighted by her own failure, squealing with laughter as her brother fetches the ball and tries again.

  She looks up at me with clear blue eyes. They’re the eyes of her father, except on this child the eyes don’t look cold at all. They sparkle.

  She’s the picture of innocence.

  When I destroy this girl’s parents, I’ll destroy this girl’s world.

  The thought hurts my heart. I look down at my hands and for a moment I imagine myself as Lady Macbeth, trying to scrub imaginary blood off my hands . . . and failing.

  “Did it feel like you were winning when there was blood on your hands?”

  Is that how Lander sees me too? As Lady Macbeth? Or does he see me as a muse? A work of art?

  Jessica distracts me from my thoughts by bending down and throwing her arms open. “Give Mommy a hug, darlings!”

  The girl doesn’t hesitate, throwing herself into her mother’s arms, almost knocking her backward, but the boy hangs back, the corners of his mouth turning downward, his face darkening at the sight of his mother’s plastered-on smile.

  So it would seem a few layers of the boy’s innocence have already been stripped away. Soon he’ll be as raw and bitter as the rest of us.

  It isn’t a pleasant thought, but then, in the end, innocence is nothing more than a vulnerability. The innocent are the ones who are most frequently betrayed.

  “Kamila,” Jessica says as she turns to the Puerto Rican woman, “don’t forget Mercedes has her gymnastic lessons today, and Braden has soccer after school.”

  “Swim lessons,” the woman who was addressed as Kamila mumbles as she takes little Mercedes’s hand.

  “Excuse me?” Jessica looks up at her, bewildered.

  “She said Mercedes has swim lessons today,” Braden explains. I’m not sure I’
ve ever heard a seven-year-old sound so condescending. “And today I have karate, not soccer.”

  “Oh.” Jessica walks over to the sofa and sits down on the very edge of the cushion. She stares out the window as if searching the morning light for answers. “What day is it, Kamila?”

  “It’s Monday, Mrs. Gable,” the nanny says patiently.

  “Oh.”

  Not another word is spoken as Kamila leads the children out of the penthouse, taking Braden to school and Mercedes to whatever activities she has planned for her. If Jessica ever intended to actually introduce me to her kids, she’s clearly forgotten about that.

  “It must be hard,” I say, making my voice heavy with sympathy.

  “What?” Jessica asks. She’s still staring out the window, maybe at the sky, maybe at nothing.

  “Raising two kids when your husband works so much.”

  “Oh, not at all.” She raises her hand up, rotates her wrist a few times. “What’s hard is not being allowed to raise them at all.”

  “Not being allowed to?”

  Jessica stills her hand so that now her wrist is flexed back, her diamond ring unable to reflect the natural sunlight. “There are things I’ll need you to do,” she says, ignoring the question. “Errands you’ll need to attend to for me . . . I’ll need you to show me respect in public and in front of the children, and please . . .” She turns to me, her eyes unfocused and misty. “If you fuck my husband, keep it to yourself.”

  I don’t answer right away, allowing the room to fall into silence as we both take inventory of the moment: How much hostility is in the room? How much understanding?

  “I’m not going to sleep with your husband,” I say quietly.

  Jessica smiles again, staring past me as if I’m not there. “Of course. See, that was good practice for the future.”

  I don’t answer. Instead, I watch the way Jessica is sort of swaying as she sits on the couch. I don’t know what she’s on, but I know that she’s stoned out of her head. She’s floating, vulnerable . . . She’s made both her mind and her will weak, which means she can be easily manipulated.

  It’s perfect.

  I sigh loudly enough for her to hear and take a seat by her side. “Why are you married to him?” I ask. “Why don’t you leave?”

  It’s a ballsy thing to ask, but what I’ve seen of her marriage has been so mind-bendingly horrific that not asking would be almost insensitive . . . and I don’t want Jessica to see me as insensitive. I want her to see me as someone who feels for her. More importantly, I want her to see me as someone who is on her side.

  “It’s a long story,” she answers.

  “You’re literally paying me to listen.”

  Jessica laughs softly, shakes her head. She’s still swaying slightly and I can’t help but wonder what I’m supposed to do if she passes out.

  “Seriously, though, I want to listen,” I press. “I don’t care what your husband says, I applied for a job to be your assistant, and as far as I’m concerned that’s what I am. I like you.”

  “Why?” Again she tries to look at me, but her pupils are so dilated it’s difficult to imagine that she can see much of anything.

  Why would anyone like this woman? Pity her, maybe . . . the kind of pity you would feel for a woman in a horror movie, the one who is too stupid to hightail it out of the haunted house.

  “I admire you” is what I settle on. “Wife, mother of two, philanthropist, fashion icon . . .”

  “Fashion icon?” Jessica’s voice shows the first sign of real animation I’ve heard from her that morning.

  “Yes,” I say with a smile. “Before I arrived for my interview I did my research. I’ve seen your features in the society pages. You always look perfect.” I drop my head as if deflated. “I’ve never been able to look as polished and put together as you. And I don’t have half as much on my plate as you do.”

  Jessica gazes at me, her brow trying to crease through the Botox. “You’re not like the other assistants Travis hires,” she says. And then she gets up and teeters down the hall.

  I’m not sure if I’m supposed to follow her, but I do. She leads me into what looks like a home office. On a desk there is a laptop and a large pile of mail, unsorted, unopened.

  “I need you to deal with this,” she says, pointing down at the envelopes. “I can’t.”

  She walks out of the room, leaving me to figure out what it means to “deal with this.”

  I sit down at the desk, but it’s the computer I attend to before the mail, in hopes that there might be something interesting on it. When I look through Jessica’s email and browsing history, it becomes immediately evident that she likes forums. She’s commented in forums about weight loss and skin care, about plastic surgery and med spas—always under one alias or another, but her email account has a record of when people have replied to her.

  I tiptoe to the doorway and look down the hall. “Mrs. Gable?” I say softly. There’s no answer. Quietly I walk down the hallway, peeking inside each room until I find her back on the sofa in the living room, sitting up but with her head lolling to the side, snoring softly. It’s actually more of a squeak than a snore, kinda like a mouse, which is appropriate considering how timid she is with her husband.

  “Mrs. Gable?” I whisper. But she’s completely dead to the world.

  So I return to the office . . .

  . . . and open up a new email account for Jessica.

  It’s incredibly easy to do. I have all her information right in front of me. I can even reply to and then erase the email that is sent to her existing account to verify that it really is Jessica setting up the new account. Once that’s taken care of, I use her new email address to register her on a few new forums dealing with abusive relationships and another dealing with self-defense. I even write a quick comment on an overwhelmed parents forum, just to round things out. As I continue to work for Jessica I’ll be able to forward certain emails sent to her real account to this new one. I’ll reply to senders and ask them to update their address book. Of course, that won’t work for her friends, assuming she has any, but there are plenty of emails in her real account that were sent by nonprofits soliciting contributions. Jessica won’t notice if a few of those organizations stop filling her email inbox. This way, everything will look legit.

  And when it’s time for her to send and receive incriminating emails . . . well, those will go through this new address too.

  I take a moment to erase the browsing history from the last hour . . . but of course, once you do something on the internet, you can’t entirely erase it. That’s good, because for now I only want to hide my activity from Jessica and Travis. When the police eventually look at her computer . . . well, they’ll find what I want them to find.

  Satisfied with the work I’ve done so far, I pick up the envelopes and start going through the mail.

  An hour later, I find Jessica in the living room, awake again but now she’s just staring out the window, a glass of white wine before her. It’s not quite ten a.m.

  “I went through the mail,” I say, sitting next to her again. “I entered the invitations into your calendar. If you like, we can go through them now and decide which should stay there and which should be removed. And, of course, I’ll RSVP for you.”

  She says nothing.

  I look directly at her, using my best girl Friday tone. “You’ve also been sent several donation requests; we could go through those too. And the ballet would like to know if you can organize another silent auction for them. They emailed a few days ago. You did want me to go through the emails too, right?”

  She shrugs, still not looking at me.

  I pause for a moment, put my hands in my lap, and angle myself toward her. “Interview me.”

  At that she turns, her expression questioning.

  “Go ahead. If I’m going to be your assistant, you should be the one to interview me. If you don’t like me I’ll leave. You can tell your husband that I just up and quit of my own
accord.”

  “If I don’t like you . . . you’ll . . . you’ll just quit?”

  “If you want me to, yes. I don’t like being anywhere I’m not really wanted, and I don’t like making people feel uncomfortable.”

  She shakes her head, unsure of how to respond.

  I straighten my posture, meet her eyes. “Interview me.”

  The corners of her mouth turn up, slowly at first, and then they move into a broad grin.

  “Where did you go to school, Bell?”

  That’s how it starts, and it goes on like that for about twenty minutes. Jessica asks all the questions that one is supposed to ask during an interview, and I give her all the answers that I know will please her. She isn’t creative, and her vices are still pumping through her veins, so she’s unable to come up with any questions that are clever or unpredictable. I have a well-practiced lie to give her in exchange for each one.

  But I can tell Jessica thinks she’s putting me through the wringer. When she asks questions like, “In what areas do you think you need to improve?” her face glows with self-congratulatory enthusiasm. She loves it when I pretend to think seriously about the question, when I nervously bite my lip.

  Jessica loves feeling like she’s in control of something . . . even if it’s just the employment status of an assistant.

  And people don’t usually let go of the one thing they have control over. They tend to hold that close.

  No one is going to be asking me to quit. My inferior position gives her purpose, justifies her.

  When we’re done Jessica gives me a nod of satisfaction and brings her glass of wine to her lips. “Do you have any questions for me?”

  I take a deep breath and look down at my hands. “What were the other assistants like?”

  “They were . . . well . . .” She hesitates and then takes another long sip before continuing. “I probably shouldn’t say this . . . but they were all a bit . . . shady. I couldn’t figure out why my husband hired them.” Her face darkens, her improved appearance slipping quickly as she downs the last of her wine. Whatever medication she’s taking, it’s not doing a great job at handling her mood swings.