Goodnight Beautiful Read online

  I wanted to interrupt and tell stories of my own, of course. How Sam rented the downstairs office in my house, and how much I enjoyed listening to his sessions. And also how lonesome I feel, knowing I can no longer walk down the hall and hear his voice dispensing expert advice in that gentle tone of his. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from placing my ear to the cold metal vent twice in the last hour, wishing things were different.

  I’m starting the review of the six-pack of Dab-A-Do! bingo daubers that arrived the other day (“Color is vibrant, exactly as pictured”) when I detect the faint sound of a car driving up the hill. I pause my typing to listen. I’d guess it’s the Pigeon returning home from a day of shopping with the #girlsquad she’s always tagging on Instagram, but I saw her hopping on the exercise bike in her bedroom ten minutes ago. I click off the monitor, put on my robe, and go downstairs. The dark gray fog outside is pierced by two beams of light as a car crests the hill and approaches the bridge. I move away. The car turns into my driveway, and the engine quiets. I hold my breath, expecting to hear footsteps thudding up the porch steps, but whoever it is jogs by the porch, down the path toward Sam’s office door. I pull back the curtains, and see the car—a green Mini Cooper with a white racing stripe—parked in my driveway.

  The French Girl is here.

  I move away from the window and go to the closet for my coat, resigned to be the one to have to tell her: Dr. Statler has been missing for forty-eight hours and is not available to indulge her insecurities for the next forty-five minutes. I open the front door and step onto the porch in my slippers. Perhaps I should offer my services, volunteer to be the one to tell her the hard, cold truth: her promiscuity is the result of low self-esteem. I happen to have been reading up on the topic since her last appointment, and I’ve come to understand that her licentious behavior stems from insufficient supervision as a young girl, leading her to use sex for attention, which will ultimately provide her with nothing but empty relationships and increased feelings of low self-worth.

  “Hello?” I call into the darkness. “Are you there?” I walk gingerly down the slippery path toward Sam’s door. Silence. And then Sam’s waiting room light clicks on.

  I duck down. She got inside. I turn and dash up the stairs into the house. My hands tremble as I lock the front door and race through the kitchen, down the hall to Agatha Lawrence’s study, where I drop to my knees in the corner of the room and pull back the smiley-face rug.

  I hear the door to his office open, and then the click of the light switch. She’s walking around, and—my god—she’s opening the desk drawers. I don’t know what to do. Call the police? Scream at her to go away? I know. I’ll go down there and remind her that this is private property. But as I’m about to stand up, she begins to cry.

  “Hi, it’s me. I’m at Sam’s office.” She’s quiet. “No, I came alone.” She pauses, sniffs. “I found the key in one of his coat pockets.” Something is off about her voice, and it takes a moment for me to realize what it is: her French accent is gone. “I just got here.”

  It hits me then. That voice. I know that voice. It’s the same voice from that YouTube lecture—“Misery and Womanhood,” which I’ve now watched at least twenty times. My head swims. The French Girl isn’t a French girl at all.

  The French Girl is his wife.

  Chapter 23

  “And?” Maddie asks nervously. “How does it look?”

  Annie slowly opens another drawer in Sam’s desk, seeing a row of pens and the grid notebooks he likes. “Fine,” she says. Books in place on his shelves, vacuum lines still in the carpet. “I was here the other day, and it looks the same.”

  Annie hears Maddie inhaling, and she pictures her cousin standing outside the restaurant she owns in Bordeaux, smoking the one cigarette she allows herself at the end of the night, after the last dinner serving. Maddie and Annie—eleven months apart—were often mistaken for sisters during the summers Annie and her parents spent in France, at the olive farm on which her mother grew up and where her aunt and uncle now live. Maddie and Annie kept a countdown calendar every year, ticking off the days until Annie would arrive and they’d share a room, even though there was space enough for Annie to have her own.

  “I don’t love you being there by yourself,” Maddie says. “Can you go now?”

  “Yes,” Annie says.

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.” Annie hangs up and scans the room. It’s peaceful here. The view of the yard, covered in a carpet of fog. The Palladian-blue walls that, Sam explained, were meant to evoke serenity. (“I thought that was your job,” she told him when he showed her the swatch.) She walks to the table next to his chair, riffling through the papers on top. A copy of an academic article on Anna Freud and defense mechanisms. The latest issue of In Touch Weekly, a story of Kris Jenner’s secret Mexican wedding on the cover.

  She sinks onto the couch and stares at Sam’s empty chair across from her, picturing him as he was a few days ago, when she appeared unexpectedly in his waiting room, pretending to be a patient.

  She closes her eyes, remembering the look on his face. A woman in a pin-striped suit and red lips had left five minutes earlier, nodding hello to Annie on her way out. “Annie,” Sam said, confused, seeing her in one of the white chairs, flipping through a New Yorker. “What are you doing here?” He came to embrace her. “I’m expecting a new patient any minute—”

  “Annie?” she said in her best French accent. “You must have me confused for another patient, Dr. Statler. My name is Charlie. I emailed to set up an appointment.”

  “That was you?” Sam paused, and she watched him connect the dots. The email he’d gotten three days earlier from a Google account she’d created for the occasion; twenty-four-year-old Charlie, restless and unsure of her future. He’d written back, suggesting this time, and Annie had been wondering if he’d go along with it. Here, at his office; the most precarious iteration of “the chase” yet. “Yes, of course. Charlie,” Sam said, as she’d hoped he would. “Forgive the mistake. Please come in. Sit wherever you’d like.”

  “Anywhere?” she’d said, stepping into his office and removing her jacket. “Even your chair?”

  He played his part wonderfully—the principled, curious therapist, asking her questions about her background, speaking in his most professional tone. She savors the thought of it. Sitting on the couch, describing, in explicit detail, the experience of having sex with another man, knowing her perfume would linger, distracting him for the remainder of the day.

  She’d planned to bring the game to a close the night of the storm, sending the text from Charlie the evening before, inviting him to her house. That afternoon, she stopped on the way home from teaching to buy two bottles of red wine and the ingredients for Sam’s favorite meal: lasagna and a loaf of warm garlic bread. All day, she’d been anticipating opening the front door to him. She planned to pour them wine and light a fire, sit barefoot on the couch. Sam would start, explaining that having feelings for one’s therapist was not wholly uncommon. She’d tell him he was smart and then go on to describe the things she’s been imagining them doing together. She was starting dinner when his text arrived, right on time at 5:03, after his last patient left.

  Hi Charlie. I’ve been thinking about your invitation.

  And?

  And I’ll be there.

  She remembers the minutes passing as she stood at the window, watching for his headlights. He’s making me wait. That was her thought, initially. He was taking his time, lingering at the office, toying with her. But then it went on too long, and he wasn’t answering her calls or texts, and she stopped believing this was part of the chase. Something had happened.

  She hears the lightest creak of floorboards above her, bringing her back to Sam’s office. Sam’s landlord is home upstairs. Too good to be true. That’s how Sam described finding this space. He’d taken the train from New York to tour the available office spaces and had called her in the morning, dejected. A few hours later, he
called again, giddy. Someone had stuck a flyer under his windshield, advertising an office space for rent. He’d gone to see it: the ground floor of a historic home a few minutes from downtown. It needed some work, Sam explained, but the owner was willing to let Sam design the space himself, create the office of his dreams. “It’s fate,” he said. “If we were looking for an indication that moving to Chestnut Hill was the right choice, we got it. It’s going to be great, Annie. I know it will.”

  She takes a deep breath and closes the closet door before leaving his office, turning off the light behind her. In the waiting room, she sees that the rain has stopped. She’s fishing in her bag for her car key when her phone rings from her back pocket. She scrambles for it, sees Crush’s name on the screen.

  “Hi,” she says into the phone, nervous. “Any news?”

  Chapter 24

  Someone is tugging at Sam’s forehead. “Can you feel this?”

  Sam tries to nod, but he can’t move his head. “Yes,” he manages.

  “Good. You’re doing great. A few more minutes and we’ll have you all stitched up. You hear me, Sam? You’re going to be fine.”

  * * *

  “Sam, sweetheart, hurry up. Your father’s waiting.”

  It’s the day of the baseball game and his mother is calling to him from the kitchen, where she’s spreading the last of the mayonnaise on two slices of crustless wheat bread while Sam’s father waits in the car with the engine running.

  “Do you have your bat?” Margaret asks, wiping her hands on a dish towel and coming out into the hall to straighten Sam’s cap.

  Sam holds up the Easton Black Magic, the best baseball bat on the market, the bat he employed to hit six homers in one game against the Hawthorne Pirates, setting a new record in the under-fifteen division. It’s two weeks before his fourteenth birthday, a day he expects will be the all-time greatest day of his life. September 6, 1995. Tickets to see Cal Ripken Jr. at Camden Yards, the day the Iron Man takes the field for his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record. Margaret is beaming. “Now don’t come home until you get that thing signed by the man himself,” she says. “Want to go through the plan again?”

  “Yes,” Sam tells her. “The line forms at the exit near section twelve. Dad and I are going to leave our seats at the top of the ninth inning to get in line.” Sam shows her the map of Camden Yards she helped him draw, a thick red Sharpie line indicating the fastest route from their seats in section 72, in left field, to the door at the opposite side of the stadium, where Ripken was rumored to appear immediately after each game, spending exactly ten minutes signing autographs. “They allow one hundred people in. I’ll be number one.”

  “Sam, come on!” Ted yells from the driveway.

  “Go on, your dad’s waiting for you.” Margaret’s eyes sparkle as she gives Sam a long hug, telling him to find a pay phone to call her from when they get to Baltimore, and then she hands him the brown paper bag with two ham sandwiches inside. “I put an extra Oreo in there for you,” she says.

  “I don’t want to go,” he says.

  She cocks her head, confused. “What do you mean, you don’t want to go? You’ve been waiting for this day your whole life.”

  “I know, but this is where he’s going to meet the Talbots model, and then he’s going to leave us. Please, don’t make me go. Please!”

  He opens his eyes.

  It’s warm and pitch-black, except for a thin strip of light coming from under a door across the room. It smells heavily antiseptic, and his back and head are throbbing.

  He’s in a hospital. St. Luke’s. The hospital where he was born; where a doctor once splinted a broken pinkie finger quick enough to get him back to the field by the sixth inning; where he sat with his mother in a private office on the fifth floor, listening to Dr. Walter Alderman diagnose her with dementia.

  “Pre-senile dementia, middle stage, to be more specific,” Dr. Alderman is saying as Sam surrenders to the darkness again. “It generally hits people very young.”

  “Okay, so we got a name for it,” Margaret says, straight-backed in her chair, a frozen smile on her face, as if Dr. Alderman has announced she won the blueberry pie contest at the fair again, six years running. “What does it mean?”

  “It means you should expect to see more of the behaviors that prompted you to call me,” he says. “Confusion. Disinhibition. The binge eating and progressive decline in socially appropriate behaviors.” He pauses to look at Sam, the son who rented a car to be there for the appointment and is now sitting stone-faced and silent. “I think we should start planning on you getting some full-time care, Margaret.”

  Sam takes his mom’s hand in the elevator, something he hasn’t done since he was little. “Oh, don’t worry,” she says, patting his arm and fighting back tears. “I’m sure he’s exaggerating. I’m not that bad.”

  In the parking lot they walk silently under a cloudless sky toward her blue Corolla, where she stops, unable to remember how to open the car door. She goes to her room when they get home, and he changes into his running clothes. He’s out the door, up Leydecker Road to Albemarle, the most punishing route up the mountain. At the top, he screams out the rage, praying to anyone who will listen that he please not lose her too.

  He wants to keep screaming, so loudly that Annie will open the door to this hospital room. He can feel her close by. Downstairs, near the Starbucks coffee kiosk, on her fifth cup of coffee, waiting for him to gain consciousness so she can take him home. But when the door opens, it’s not Annie, it’s the doctor again, checking the wound on his forehead and slipping more pills into his mouth, plunging him back toward a sleep devoid entirely of dreams.

  Chapter 25

  Sitting alone at my kitchen table, I skim bleary-eyed through the last of the articles I printed from a variety of trusted websites.

  In conclusion, most sexual health professionals agree that sexual role-playing, when done appropriately, can help happily married couples further deepen their connection, while being a powerful and enjoyable source of empowerment for both partners. The bored accountant can become a merciless despot. The harried stay-at-home mom can envision herself a seductress. The possibilities are endless.

  I set the article aside and take a handful of Smartfood from the bowl next to me. Okay, fine, I get it. Dr. Annie Marie Potter was pretending to be a sultry twenty-four-year-old French girl in order to increase her confidence inside and outside the bedroom, while getting to know Sam in a more intimate manner. The accent. Her age. It was all part of it. This is, apparently, a thing, if Dr. Steven Perkins, resident sex expert at AskMen.com, can be trusted. According to his study, nearly 66 percent of all married couples have at some point in their relationship engaged in this type of behavior.

  I scrape the last kernels from the bowl and shake my head, convinced I’ll never understand the mating rituals of married couples. How could I? My longest romantic relationship was exactly zero days. (Actually, here’s something I know: the fact that they chose to do this at his place of business, a room I imagine many of his patients consider sacred, is, in my opinion, taking it too far.) I wash the popcorn bowl and begin to water my collection of hanging plants when my alarm dings with a reminder. The news is about to begin.

  In the living room, I aim the remote at the television, expecting Eyewitness News to open at 11:00 p.m. as it did at 6:00: with local meteorologist Irv Weinstein, standing outside the station, braving the cold. But it’s not Irv, it’s the blonde with the tight face, wearing a pink polyester dress. The words search for missing doctor flash next to her head on the TV screen.

  “We begin tonight with an update on Dr. Sam Statler, the local man who was reported missing two days ago. As the police spent the last forty-eight hours trying to piece together what may have happened to the missing psychologist, residents of Chestnut Hill came out in full force to attend a community-wide search this afternoon. For more on this, we’ll go to Alex Mulligan, reporting live.”

  A diff
erent woman in a blue rain jacket fills the screen. “That’s right, Natalie,” she says. “Nearly one hundred volunteers spent this rainy Friday afternoon combing areas like the woods behind Brookside High School”—she jerks a thumb at the copse of trees in shadow behind her—“where Sam Statler was once a star athlete. Unfortunately, not one clue was uncovered to determine what may have happened to him the night of the storm, after he was reported leaving work around five p.m. As everyone knows, there was a travel advisory in effect, and conditions were considered extremely dangerous. I’m here with the man who spearheaded the search.” The camera pans back, revealing a smiling Crush Andersen, the beefy former linebacker who was glad-handing everyone at the bowling alley today. “Crush, tell us what you were hoping to find in today’s search,” the reporter says, tipping the microphone toward him.

  “Anything that might help solve this,” Crush says. “But mostly his car. We had a great crowd come out today, despite the bad weather, and we were able to cover even more ground than we’d hoped to. If Stats had been in an accident on the way home, we would have found his car.”

  “Given the lack of clues, what do you think may have happened to your old friend?”

  Crush shakes his head, apparently bewildered. “No idea. But we’re going to keep the faith that he’s okay, and this is all going to turn out fine.”

  The reporter offers a sympathetic nod before throwing the story back to Natalie at the news desk, who segues into a story about another round of layoffs at a local chicken plant. I click off the television and head upstairs to my room, trusting that Crush is right.

  Sam’s okay and this is all going to turn out fine.

  Chapter 26